INSPIRATION

It was a long time before it dawned on Marmaduke McSmith that he must be an artist and a great one possibly. Unfortunately his profession was that of an undertaker’s clerk, which did not allow him all the leisure or any of the atmosphere necessary to greater kinds of writing. This was specially so during the bronchitis season. A writer: since his artistry almost necessarily took the form of pen and ink, for scrivener he was bred. Doubtless had he been educated to ply the brush on front doors or upon bath tubs his instinct would have turned toward portraiture. But the pen had been his technical medium and year after year he had written mortuary letters and filed the missives of mourners and the orders of the orphan. There was a faint suggestion of widows’ houses about his ledger, and the tears of the fatherless had diluted his ink.

All day he sat behind a curtain in the office of the old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash. In the front window were two cremation urns, and like a relic of the past hung a large hatchment scrolled with an extinct coat of arms. Good taste combined with good business to keep all sight of coffins to the inner parlour. Not a hint was heard, not a funeral note. As befitted a member of the British Undertakers’ Association, Marmaduke McSmith was deeply absorbed by the detail and technical knowledge of the burial craft. The Undertakers’ Journal at his side seldom added a new detail or afforded a new suggestion to his mind. He read little else except the obituary notices in every morning paper. In this form he sipped his daily portion of the world’s news. His life was that of a booking clerk to Hades. But his proficiency delighted the customers, and his mastery of minutiæ edified Gammon and Hardwash. Envious clerks whispered that it was only a matter of half a century before he actually became a partner; coequal with Gammon, consubstantial with Hardwash!

He had the true undertaker’s outlook. He often amused himself by measuring people with his eye in the street for their coffins or guessing straight off the style and class of funeral they could afford. He perceived the living world in the terms and catalogue of death. Oak and elm meant to him no stately foliaged trees but polished caskets underground. He had a marvellous mind for “ruffles and sheets,” for breastplates and handles, for cars and cortège. Happy it might be said was the corpse which received the funeral classified as “Class V Adults,” a form of mortuary pomp he had devised to the last detail. In the firm’s catalogue it was simply described as “Gammon and Hardwash’s Jubilee model,” for some of the leading ideas in the disposition of the cortège had been taken from an attentive study of the second Jubilee procession of Queen Victoria. It was a masterpiece of taste and economy and was referred to feelingly in the trade as “Mourner’s Pride.” It was a marvel that so young and inexperienced a man as Marmaduke McSmith should have devised the nonpareil of the undertaking world. He was assuredly intended for high place. He might be President of the Undertakers’ Association yet. But all this was only the sepulchral gossip of the parlours, rumours caught on the chilly little winds that blow down the alleys of one Necropolis or another.

In his way Marmaduke was developing into an artist. Whatever department he touched he adorned. He was given the delicate supervision of the Embalming. He promptly made himself adept in the theory and practice of human conserves. He was generally chosen to nick the wrists and groins of the dead before inserting the blood-pumping tube. His gestures were those of the cunning surgeon rather than the job butcher. He never lost dignity. He never allowed the embalming fluids to be spoken of as pickles! Then he was given the firm’s correspondence. All day he sat perusing the letters and orders that flowed as regularly as death into the letter-box of the firm, corpse measurements, sentimentalities, absurd requests for shells of sandalwood and silk and plush linings, dogs’ coffins, catafalques for favourite cats; all of which he read methodically and answered discreetly, practically and soothingly, and great was the business of Gammon and Hardwash. He wished that clients would write more sensibly and often imagined the brief and businesslike letters he would have written in their place. He possessed a neat pen, but it was a long time before it dawned upon him that it might be the pen of a great artist and that he must write about the living and not the dead.

Had he lived in ancient Egypt when that country was possessed and ruled by one gigantic undertakers’ trust, when embalmment was the national art, and literature found its outlet on the lids of coffins, he might have stayed in the business and realised himself as an artist among the dead. But as he scribbled his first creative phrases on the backs of requiem and obituary cards and sketched his poetical drama in empty corners of his ledger he felt the overwhelming call to follow his Inspiration and cut adrift from this sepulchral business in which he felt he was being slowly buried. But it required pluck as well as decision to swim from his secreted moorings into the literary tide. He knew that he would be without cable or anchor and his eyes had often peered through the curtains on that haggard crowd of clerks and hacks and journalists making their way by day and by night towards Fleet Street and the great printing and publishing houses. He knew how much genius and inspiration had been gulfed in that stagnant Niagara. He knew those waters were oily with the midnight oil and that their eddies were lingering signs of the struggling writers who had sunk beneath the surface. Still the artist in him bade him go out and seek his Inspiration there. He felt confident of his ability to wear the Palm, but a little diffident of his enjoyment of the pains and penalties which crown the palmward path.

Anyhow he had saved enough to afford a three months’ lifebelt, while he took the risk. All Art is a risk. Perhaps the Artist represents the form that gambling takes among the immortal gods, who set the pieces of human life on the earth’s green baize. Perhaps it amuses them to lay odds on the Oddities of Life? Perhaps the gods have Favourites as much as the betting public? It is a gamble whether the divine fire can find itself. It was a risk whether in those three months he could catch anchorage, security or even success and literary position. But he shuddered when he looked at the scurrying whirlpool of souls perhaps once as divinely inspired as he, caught now a hundred times more miserably in the shabby nets of underpaid slavery. There was a side to his nature which appreciated the dignity and seclusion of Gammon and Hardwash. On rainy days and in the bronchial season this was specially the case. The more unpleasant the weather, the snugger he kept himself in the little curtained parlour where he wrote and worked. Better be a dormouse hibernating warmly and well fed in his nest than a starving and unnoticed lion.

He never took the plunge until he was inspired by Queenie Elkington to resign without asking pension or character from Gammon and Hardwash. They used to meet after work was over outside the Tube and sit together in eating-house corners and he used to read her his poetical drama. She listened wonderingly. She was full of admiration for his punctuation even. There was music in his commas and he could convey ecstasy with a semicolon. She was the kind of audience a writer loves, fair in every way.

It was Queenie who persuaded him that he must suffer for his Art. Was starvation necessary? he asked her. She told him that any soul worth its mettle would welcome the pain of its enclosing body. Her words gave him vision and a direct metaphor from life. He felt that to cling to his present stability and petty comfort was stagnation and worse—embalmment! Just as grooms develop horse sense and equine features, so he was in danger of becoming a walking corpse. Undertaking is a mummifying profession. Sometimes he felt as though he were bound by invisible shrouds. And all the while Queenie was hinting liberty, offering to share her dressmaking wage with him and incidentally her starvation. He knew that her hours were twice his and her wage a half of his salary. Between his salary and her slavery a gulf indeed seemed to stretch. Slavery that was primitive, terrible, logical, and perhaps the only setting civilisation still had to offer the bulk of women. She was tempting him to abandon his steady stagnation and clutch the flying success to which she felt inspired to inspire him. And if he missed, she would slave for him. He hardly knew sometimes whether she was tempting or testing him. In the end he felt merely tired. Better be a starving poet, he felt, than a tired undertaker.

The Artist’s head was lowered over his empty teacup and he murmured: “Will the London sparrows bring me bread or the ravens boil me tea?” A quick sheen danced through her eyes and into his, telling him how wonderfully he spoke words and prophesying the lightning that would be evoked by his writing in the future. The Artist could see his genius flashing under her eyelids and his epigrams unborn curling to her lips. Talking to her seemed to cause poetry to swim into his brain and he took the plunge. The old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash regretted the departure of the most sepulchral and unlively of their assistants.

As she had swayed him, so she buoyed him. Once he had made an Artist’s despairing gesture towards life and suffered himself to be carried along upon the tide, she attended to the rest. She toiled to make life in the single room of a tenement practicable. He wrote all day and rested wearily at night while she finished her over-work, not on the delicious teas of fifty years ago but on the black-stewed juice reboiled from the night before. He generally had enough to eat, and the first poems and stories, that she placed for him with editors, served to stave off starvation. But starvation is not easily sated, and besides the Artist owed it to Humanity to devote his time to a great poetical drama. Like many of those whose lives are inspired with the enrichment of Humanity as a whole, humanity is forgotten at home. His Drama grew upon him and he no longer looked with pity into Queenie’s white face. Love even dwindled aside if not away. He looked to her greedily for food and inspiration. He used the light in her eyes like an invisible fire to ferment the images in his brain. As she grew whiter and thinner, his verbalisation increased and his pen glowed with the current of poetic drama he was laying upon sheet after sheet. Had he worked faster, perhaps she would not have had to live so long on half-rations. But the Artist took a slow, luxurious pleasure in his work, and she would not have had him hurried for worlds.

By the time his Poetic Drama was complete their affairs were rather desperate. She took it out to market. It was one thing to find editors who did not mind throwing guineas like solitary bones to poets, but to find a manager willing to produce the most stupendous Drama of modern times was the quest of a lifetime, and her repeated suggestion that it was a lineal and lyrical successor to the works of Shakespeare fell on what might be called Baconian ears. One manager she was able to draw into discussion at least as to its merits, though he was amused at the idea of placing Drama before the public that was not only serious and poetic but beautifully written. He had produced the wildly successful Revue, “Moneytime is Honeytime,” to say nothing of the winsome farce called “Blue-eye’s Eighth Husband.” He was a nice, oil-scrubbed gentleman with permanently waved black wire round his head. He was always kind to ladies on the ground that kindness should be reciprocal. On hearing her mention of Shakespeare he made a personal allusion to Romeo and Juliet which was lost on her. But he promised to read the Drama and make a decision on the morrow.

Next day when she returned, he asked her to come to supper forthwith as an instalment of payment. In a frenzied moment she concluded that he intended to produce the Drama. As she ate his fresh food that evening, her wits gathered themselves out of weary hope and arranged themselves pleasantly on the hall steps of achievement. He made no remarks about the Drama, on which she could have passed an examination, having typed and overtyped and undertyped every line many times. He asked her how often she ate such a supper and whether she took champagne at breakfast, and finally if the dramatist was her husband. To all of which questions the answer was necessarily in the negative. Though he appeared satisfied, he proceeded to detail some of the possible expenditure needed to produce Poetic Drama on the English stage. It was a question of the expenditure to be lavished on a funeral. Great Drama was dead and Mr. McSmith’s Drama was great, he reasoned. He only wished he had the money to embalm such a Drama and keep it on the stage regardless of the public. The omen in his words unnerved her for a moment. A dead hand seemed to be stretched out of the undertaking past to crush the flower of the poetic present. Tears welled in her eyes and she looked hopelessly at the Manager, who promptly judged that the appropriate moment had come to make acceptance of the Drama. He began discussing rehearsals and alluding to royalties, to all the details, the cabbages and kings of the Theatre, the chances of a king in a box at an opening night or of cabbages being thrown at the actors on the last. Nevertheless Mr. McSmith’s Drama was accepted. Thinking only of the Dramatist, she made a practical reflection as to the price to be paid him. “The price of what?” asked the Manager. “The price you would be willing to pay for the acting the drama?” He observed her coolly and observed: “What price would you pay us for producing it?” Then it was all trickery and deception! Was that cold face one of mockery or——? She rose to go.

But he still fingered the manuscript and motioned her to stay. It was several minutes before she quite caught his drift. It struck her with a dim sickness at the back of her brain. Then he did expect such payment as she could make. The situation planted itself round her with ruthless logicality. Art needed a triangle for its woof to be woven. There was the Artist, there was his Inspiration and finally the medium by which his Art reached the world, whether it was publisher or picture-dealer or producer. Without each other they fell into nothingness. Queenie realised that it was not enough to have been the Inspiration. She must find the producer and unite all three as it were in her own person. Dramatic art could not live until the breath of production had been breathed into its verbal coils. Very simply and without tears she decided she must pay the producer, and returned, leaving the manuscript of the Drama at the theatre. She felt no resentment when she surrendered herself.

Late that night she told the man whom she had loved, and, what was greater, whom she had inspired, that his Drama had been accepted on its merits. Then followed days when they both battened on expectancy and drank the thin, vibrating wine of hope. Rehearsals drew near. Contracts appeared in black and white. Rehearsals were successful; and the first night blazed like a comet out of space, the night that affords a greater consummation to the Artist than to the lover. For the first night to the Dramatist is twofold. To him the acts of creation and of birth are simultaneous. Solemnly outwardly, and sinkingly within, Marmaduke McSmith sat through the hours listening to his own words trembling and tossing on the lips of the hired interpreters, while his songs were mercifully tempered by the slow thrill of the choric accompaniment. By his side sat the woman whose whole being had served to bring him to this accomplishment. Marmoreal was her countenance, but her eyes shone with the steady light of sapphires, the unalterable triumph of Art over chaos and night. His eyes glistened one moment like diamonds as panic swept through them and twitched the optic nerve, but the next moment they grew dulled and lulled with the auto-intoxication of pride. Queenie and Marmaduke watched and watched till all was sung or said and he suddenly caught a sweeter sound than even his own words—the repeated cheering of success. All was over! The critics were rushing to their inkpots, the first-nighters were moving towards supper and the Artist was receiving friends in his box, blown and bloated suddenly with the ovation of fame. The golden effluvia of compliments and applause bathed his hot brow. He struggled down to the stage puffed and bewildered; speechless save for the few words he was made to mumble through the blinding calcium.

It was Fate that thrust him into the Manager’s room, where he had left his overcoat, and suffered him to receive one flashlight of Queenie Elkington. The Manager’s evil kiss was upon her marble cheek. Marmaduke blustered between them and dragged her home. He looked at the wretched woman trembling half in pride for him and half in shame for herself. Then he asked: “When did he start doing that?” The inspiration faded out of her eyes. “It wasn’t the first time, was it?” She answered him simply, “No, not the first time. He kissed me the day I brought him your manuscript.” The Artist searched furiously in her cloudless eyes and found nothing in the way of regret.

The next weeks were carried breathlessly upon the Drama’s triumphant wings. Press reviews descended like a mist of coloured laudation. Resonant interviews swamped the thin stream of prickling criticism. The Artist really had no need to worry about his Inspiration. For the time fame was poured to him from silver flagons, and wealth handed up on a gold plate. Vanity of vanities! but all authorship becomes vanity. When the most beautiful member of the chorus knelt and kissed his hand he felt strangely moved. It was because his hand had written the Drama. Men thought it an honour and women thought it lucky to touch that hand, those inspired fingers. He was very pleased with the action of the chorus girl, and the following day he noted that she was fairly fair, and the week following that she was pretty pretty, so to speak. And the more he liked her, the angrier he felt with Queenie for letting the Manager embrace her on that night of nights. It was rather bitter, but bitterness when it stays and curdles in the mind often brings about a decision. Perhaps it was a stroke of luck after all, for it dawned on his mind that he had a perfect excuse for leaving Queenie when he felt so inclined, and he told her so. He spoke to her as a father might speak to an erring daughter. She had served him well and he would always think kindly of her, but now that he was famous he could not afford to have his name connected with a woman who was susceptible to anything as vulgar as a theatrical manager. He was an Artist and he owed a duty to his Inspiration. He turned her out. His drama touched a hundredth performance that same night.

She had no redress and she passed silently and whitely into the black roaring night, into the whirlpool above which she had sustained him in his months of obscurity. For the last time the light glittered in her eyes, though it met no response from his iris, which was blurred with a little red patch as he went his way, floating buoyantly, basking in a limelit sea, watching his own portentous shadow bulge in the theatric moonlight. He thoroughly enjoyed being the successful dramatic writer of the day. He was very agile at bearing the Palm. Actors and Managers came buzzing and puffing round him, pleading and imploring him to write another play. It was weeks before he consented even to return to work. It was without misgiving eventually that he dipped pen into the silver inkstand presented by the staff after the five hundredth performance; the pen by the way tipped with a real ruby, the grateful tribute of the Chorus. For inspiration there was the new beloved practising steps in a Poiret gown on his expensive Persian carpet. Yet it was not all as inspiring as might have been expected. The Artist wrote phrases at intervals and the week’s work filled many sheets, but too often he found himself chewing the ruby knot at the end of his pen. Then he would call the chorus girl to his knee and peer into her eyes, which were lit with artificial radiance. They lacked the stellar light which used to beckon him from Queenie’s orbs. He looked in them and always saw the fiery fume of his own pleasure. There was nothing mysterious or new, nothing that he did not know before. He never saw the shapes he used to see of dreams personifying in his partner’s eyes. But on the material side he was much better off. He drank Tokay instead of tea, and ate fresh caviare instead of stale seed cake. And he twirled his pen and his hair and the chorus girl in turns. And nothing very wonderful happened on paper. He was still twirling all three a year later when his first drama had been given a rest on the stage and managers were asking anxiously and then angrily why he had not filled his contract to write another. He had thought he was safe in giving himself a year to write and he had written reams, but he did not dare show them to the managers. Compared to the first it was merely corked wine.

He felt that he needed a rest and the inevitable and harassing month on the Riviera followed. The chorus girl died of influenza in an hotel after losing six months’ royalties for him in the local Casino. When he returned to London he found he was in debt and that his furniture was being sold out of his flat. He sat down to twirl pen and thumbs again, but only succeeded in breaking the encrusted ruby off his penholder with exasperation. Eventually he mislaid it. It was found next morning and safely placed in a pawnbroker’s safe by a careful charwoman. The silver inkpot had become caked with the ink which flowed in but not out. Hours he passed staring blankly into blank paper and trying to crush the half-formed answers to the eternal query why could he not write another Poetic Drama as beautiful and as wonderful as the first. But the fire was gone and he could not catch the wistful pleasantry which the critics were fond of divining in his lyrics. It would not come to the surface of his mind as it had, when he lived humbly and cheaply, lacking all that he now enjoyed in such abundance. As though abundance can ever be enjoyed, as cats drowning in cream have never failed to observe. He lacked nothing now except perhaps the one thing necessary!

At last he arose darkly and miserably in the night. There was nothing left to be done but to wander forth in search of his lost Inspiration. He felt leaden-footed and soiled in the soul. If his mind still moved it was like a hobbledehoy and no longer a Pegasus. He started in mad search for what he had lost. He swam into the first dance hall and listened to the jazz-rhythms with their slow and broken cross-ripples. He watched the undulating shoulders of the dancers as they circled and cross circled. But neither rhythm nor song did they lend him. Then he passed into a drinking cabaret and began sipping the yellow and pink-coloured mixtures called cocktails which are to true wine as mosaics are to real sculpture. But again he found no release. In vain he drank unintoxicating intoxicants, quenchers that proved unquenching, potations that were impotent, and the chill, stupefying drench which neither cheers nor inebriates and is called wormwood.

The Artist was at the end of all artificial expedients, and it was very late when he came to close truths with himself, and walked deliberately toward the mean street where he believed Queenie was living. He had left her with enough to live on and paid the rent on their old lodging for a year in advance. He crept into the ghastly tenement building. He knocked and knocked vainly. There was no answer. He leaned miserably against the door and it swung open. He slipped into the foul passage and stood before the single room in which his first Drama, his masterpiece, had been written. It was tightly closed, but the lock snapped under his thrust. He felt resentful against the room and against the woman whom he had left there, and resentful against himself, for an Artist only hates himself when he realises that his Art has deserted him. A stale odour and a dead draught met him as he entered. He called and there was no answer. He knew his way round the room in the dark and he groped in the corner for the gas jet. He turned it on, but it made no lucent response to a lighted match. The gas meter was empty and then he noticed that he had turned the gas off instead of on. He twisted it back and forward. By the light of a second match he looked round the room and his eyes fell on the bed where his Inspiration lay cold and self-slain before her time.

In a moment all his ambition and hope seemed to be turned off as completely as the gas. He was where he was before he met Queenie Elkington. He turned and shuffled back to his flat. He knew now that the virtue had gone out of him, and why. The Artist in him shrivelled into the undertaker’s clerk. He sat down before the ink-crusted silver inkstand and began writing on a blank sheet slowly in scrivener’s copperplate. He wrote to order the most beautiful coffin procurable. It must be made of scented wood and lined with silk, and the fittings must be of solid silver. In it he explained that he intended to bury all that was precious to him, his guardian angel in the past, what might have been his ambition in the future, and the Inspiration which had forsaken him in the present. And this pathetic letter he sealed and addressed to the old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash.