第58章

I know I can write good fiction and I'll force you fellows to admit it yet.I'll make you change the spelling of 'regrets' to 'c-h-e-q-u-e' before I'm done with you."Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, skeptical expression--the copyrighted expression of the editor beleagured by the unavailable contributor.

"Have you read the last story I sent you--'The Alarum of the Soul'?"asked Dawe.

"Carefully.I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did.It had some good points.I was writing you a letter to send with it when it goes back to you.I regret--""Never mind the regrets," said Dawe, grimly."There's neither salve nor sting in 'em any more.What I want to know is _why_.

Come now; out with the good points first."

"The story," said Westbrook, deliberately, after a suppressed sigh, "is written around an almost original plot.Characterization--the best you have done.Construction--almost as good, except for a few weak joints which might be strengthened by a few changes and touches.

It was a good story, except--"

"I can write English, can't I?" interrupted Dawe.

"I have always told you," said the editor, "that you had a style.""Then the trouble is--"

"Same old thing," said Editor Westbrook."You work up to your climax like an artist.And then you turn yourself into a photographer.I don't know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, but that is what you do with everything that you write.No, I will retract the comparison with the photographer.

Now and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective, manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth.But you spoil every d'enouement by those flat, drab, obliterating strokes of your brush that I have so often complained of.If you would rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic senses, and paint them in the high colors that art requires, the postman would leave fewer bulky, self-addressed envelopes at your door.""Oh, fiddles and footlights!" cried Dawe, derisively."You've got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet.When the man with the black mustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say:

'May high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of another's vengeance!'"Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.

"I think," said he, "that in real life the woman would express herself in those words or in very similar ones.""Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage," said Dawe hotly."I'll tell you what she'd say in real life.She'd say:

'What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It's one trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station.Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd like to know? For God's sake, get out of my way or I'll never get ready.

Not that hat--the brown one with the velvet bows.Bessie must have been crazy; she's usually shy of strangers.Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I'm upset!'

"That's the way she'd talk," continued Dawe."People in real life don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises.They simply can't do it.If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that's all.""Shack," said Editor Westbrook impressively, "did you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?""I never did," said Dawe."Did you?"

"Well, no," said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown."But I can well imagine what she would say.""So can I," said Dawe.

And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle and silence his opinionated contributor.It was not for an unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the _Minerva Magazine_, contrary to the theories of the editor thereof.

"My dear Shack," said he, "if I know anything of life I know that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate expression of feeling.How much of this inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say.The sublimely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings.But it is also true that all men and women have what may be called a sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion--a sense unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language befitting their importance and histrionic value.""And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the stunt?" asked Dawe.

"From life," answered the editor, triumphantly.

The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but dumbly.He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately his dissent.

On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.

"Punch him one, Jack," he called hoarsely to Dawe."W'at's he come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen'lemen that comes in the square to set and think?"Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.