Read Ebook: Eris by Chambers Robert W Robert William

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Ebook has 2208 lines and 60363 words, and 45 pages

"I'll take it without sample or further identification. It may cost me my job. Are we on?"

"No, you crazy Irishman. Let me alone, I tell you. I may change my mind and try a play, or a continuity direct,--hang it all, I might even burst into verse. Do you want some poems?" he threatened.

"No," replied Coltfoot calmly, "but I'll take them."

"I'll do one farewell article for you. I'll do it to-night. But that ends it."

"How about the poems?"

"Your public asks for it."

"They haven't!"

"Let 'em stay put, then," growled Annan.

"You mean you are going to abandon your public?"

"No writer can afford to abandon his public," said Coltfoot, seriously.

He shrugged: "So maybe, in my own cheap little job I have hit my high-spot with those stories of yours.... Maybe.... But I'm going on, I'm going to write what I please if it costs me my last reader."

Coltfoot made his last effort: "Dumas wrote 'Twenty Years After'?"

"There was only one 'Three Musketeers.'"

"Sure.... The greatest romance ever written.... Sure.... All right, Barry...."

That evening Annan made himself some black coffee and wrote his farewell article for Coltfoot. It took him only half an hour and it left him too much keyed up for sleep. He called his article: "The Great American Ass."

"September flowers gone to seed," it began, deceptively; "withering leaves and dry dirt--the Park and Fifth Avenue at their shabbiest. Streets torn up, piles of sand, escaping steam, puddles of mortar, red flag and red lantern crowning the d?bris, and the whole mess stinking of illuminating gas: heat, dirt, noise--unnecessary, incessant, hellish noise--seven million sweating people milling like maggots in the midst--your New York, fellow citizens, on an unwashed platter!

"For the beauty of woman is as usual in New York as it is rare in the capitals of Europe. Without the charm, symmetry, vivacity of the faces of her women, New York would be, indeed, the ugliest, dingiest, and stupidest metropolis in the world.

"Flower-like her pretty women bloom all over the arid, treeless agglomeration of mortar and metal, serene amid the asinine clamour; smiling, piquant, nourished by suffocating heat, flourishing in arctic cold, hardy, healthy, wonderful in the vast abiding place of the Great American Ass,--New York.

"Here is his stronghold and he runs it to suit himself. Any woman manages her own flat far better.

"For your New Yorker comes of an untidy race, knowing neither civic nor national pride in the proper sense.

"His forefathers cleared forests and lived among charred stumps. He is aware of no inborn necessity for beauty.

"New York is the wastrel among states. Her sons pollute streams; her country roads are vistas of bill-boards; even the 'eternal' hills that line the Hudson crumble daily into cement. Here the Great American Ass found a Paradise and created a Dump. He ravages, stamps out, obliterates the lovely face of nature,--digs, burns, crushes, tramples. Hundreds of miles of ghastly, charred forests mark the trail of the Great American Ass among his mountains. Filthy sea-waves dash his refuse upon his shores.

"Loud, wanton, strident, and painted his metropolis sprawls, unbuttoned, on the island leering at ugliness and devastation. And, in her dirty ears, the ceaseless and complacent braying of the Great American Ass. Her lover, Bottom, the eternal New Yorker.

"Any woman's kitchen is cleaner and her household run with greater economy.

"Poor bread--when France can teach him what bread really is--poorly prepared food, making candy eaters of an entire people--an alimentary viciousness unknown where food is properly cooked and properly eaten.

"So poor that your laws are made for you by the most recently settled and most ignorant section of the nation.

"The 'Centre of Population,' with its incubus of half educated women, prescribes your bodily and your moral menu. And you become a metropolis of moonshiners.

"What are you, Manhattan? Ruins already, alas, to build upon--the Yankee Ninevah trodden by an ass less wild.

"And yet the endless caravans continue. Still, to New York come all things, all people. And, alas, Youth comes too, and all afire to see and learn and achieve. High ideals, high hopes, vigour, courage, face to face with the Great American Ass enthroned amid the d?bris.

"Youth floundering in the dump-heap bares a clean sword to hew its way to beauty. And strikes a shower of ashes. There is no sympathy; no audience for beauty in New York.

"Dull eyes look on, dull minds weary. There is official inquiry as to the purpose of 'these here art artists.' The waiter, taxi-driver, janitor, gambler of yesterday are the arbiters of Art on Broadway to-day.

"It is not a sword that Youth needs in New York; it is a gas-mask. And, somewhere, Destiny is already mixing mortar and Fate is baking bricks for that coming temple that shall stand upon the futile ruins where, some day, shall be disinterred the fossil bones of the Great American Ass."

Annan sent it to Coltfoot with a note:

"This is a crazy article. You don't have to use it."

But the majority of New Yorkers liked the article, and grinned, having been overfed on "our fair city" stuff.

Besides, the tendency of the times was toward the unpleasant.

Stilton and caviar are acquired tastes.

That night Annan made himself some black coffee and began his first novel, "The Cloud."

About three o'clock in the morning he tore up what he had written and smoked another pipe.

"Oh, the rotten start!" he yawned, conscious that inwardly he was all a-tremble with creative power,--like a boiler that taxes its safety valve.

The young vigour in him laughed its menace. All the insolent certainty of youth was in his gesture as he flung the torn manuscript into the fireplace.

That night he embarked upon the sea of dreams. He seldom dreamed. But this night tall clouds loomed in his sleep and an ocean rolled away. His ship plunged on, always on, he at the helm.

Far upon the storm-wastes pitched a tiny craft under naked poles, hurled toward destruction. As he drove past her under thundering sail he saw--for the first time in any dream--the ghost of Eris lashed to the little helm, her death-white face fixed, her gaze intent upon the last fading star.

He awoke calling to her, the strain of nightmare an agony in his throat, and shaking all over. But now, awake, he couldn't understand what had so terrified him in his dream, why he quivered so.

"I suppose I thought she couldn't ride out the storm in that cockle-shell," he muttered, gazing at the grey warning of dawn outside his windows.

The first sparrow chirped. Annan pulled the quilt over his ears, disgusted.

"I ought to look up that kid," he thought.

It was his last conscious effort until he awoke for another day.

Annan, leaving the Province Club--one of the remaining threads attaching him to the conventional world--espied Coltfoot.

They had not met in weeks, and they shook hands affectionately.

"What are you doing these days, Mike?" inquired Annan.

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