Half a Rogue | Page 8

which bring to the novelist or
dramatist, or any man of talent, a real and singular pleasure. It is
precious because honest and devoid of the tawdry gilt of flattery.
Richard Warrington--You will smile, I know, when you read this letter,
doubtless so many like it are mailed to you day by day. You will toss it
into the waste-basket, too, as it deserves to be. But it had to be written.
However, I feel that I am not writing to a mere stranger, but to a friend
whom I know well. Three times you have entered into my life, and on
each occasion you have come by a different avenue. I was ill at school
when you first appeared to me. It was a poem in a magazine. It was so
full of the spirit of joyousness, so full of kindliness, so rich in faith and

hope, that I cried over it, cut it out and treasured it, and re-read it often
in the lonely hours when things discouraged me,--things which mean so
little to women but so much to girls. Two years went by, and then came
that brave book! It was like coming across a half-forgotten friend. I
actually ran home with it, and sat up all night to complete it. It was
splendid. It was the poem matured, broadened, rounded. And finally
your first play! How I listened to every word, watched every move! I
wrote you a letter that night, but tore it up, not having the courage to
send it to you. How versatile you must be: a poem, a book, a play! I
have seen all your plays these five years, plays merry and gay, sad and
grave. How many times you have mysteriously told me to be brave! I
envy and admire you. What an exquisite thing it must be to hear one's
thoughts spoken across the footlights! Please do not laugh. It would
hurt me to know that you could laugh at my honest admiration. You
won't laugh, will you? I am sure you will value this letter for its
honesty rather than for its literary quality. I have often wondered what
you were like. But after all, that can not matter, since you are good and
kind and wise; for you can not be else, and write the lofty things you
do.
Warrington put the letter away, placed it carefully among the few
things he held of value. It would not be true to say that it left him
unaffected. There was an innocent barb in this girlish admiration, and it
pierced the quick of all that was good in him.
"Good and kind and wise," he mused. "If only the child knew!
Heigh-ho! I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I
can't disillusion the child, happily; she has given me no address."
He rose, wheeled his chair to a window facing the street, and opened it.
The cool fresh April air rushed in, clearing the room of its opalescent
clouds, cleansing his brain of the fever that beset it. He leaned with his
elbows on the sill and, breathed noisily, gratefully. Above, heaven had
decked her broad bosom with her flickering stars, and from the million
lamps of the great city rose and floated a tarnished yellow haze. So
many sounds go forth to make the voices of the night: somewhere a
child was crying fretfully, across the way the faint tinkle of a piano, the

far-off rattle of the elevated, a muffled laugh from a window, above,
the rat-tat of a cab-horse, the breeze in the ivy clinging to the walls of
the church next door, the quarrelsome chirp of the sleepy sparrows; and
then, recurrence. Only the poet or the man in pain opens his ears to
these sounds.
Over on Broadway a child of his fertile brain was holding the rapt
attention of several hundred men and women; and across the broad land
that night four other dramas were being successfully acted. People were
discussing his theories, denouncing or approving his conception of life.
The struggle was past, his royalties were making him rich. And here he
was this night, drinking the cup of bitterness, of unhappiness, the
astringent draft of things that might and should have been. The coveted
grape was sour, the desired apple was withered. Those who traverse the
road with Folly as boon companion find only emptiness.
And so it was with Warrington. He had once been good, wholly good
and kind and wise, lofty as a rural poet who has seen nothing of life
save nature's pure and visible face. In the heat of battle he had been
strong, but success had subtly eaten into the fibers and loosed his hold,
and had swept him onward into that whirlpool