Half a Rogue | Page 9

out of which no man
emerges wholly undefiled. It takes a great and strong man to withstand
success, and Warrington was only a genius. It was not from lack of will
power; rather it was because he was easy-going and loved pleasure for
its own sake. He had fought and starved, and now for the jingle of the
guinea in his pocket and the junkets of the gay! The prodigality of these
creative beings is not fully understood by the laity, else they would
forgive more readily the transgressions. Besides, the harbor of family
ties is a man's moral bulwark; and Warrington drifted hither and thither
with no harbor in view at all.
He had been an orphan since his birth; a mother meant simply a giver
of life, and a father meant, even less. Until he had read the reverse and
obverse sides of life, his sense of morality had lain dormant and
untilled. Such was his misfortune. The solitary relative he laid claim to
was an aged aunt, his father's sister. For her he had purchased a
beautiful place in the town of his birth, vaguely intending to live out his

old age there.
There had been a fight for all he possessed. Good had not come easily,
as it does to some particularly favored mortals. There was no family,
aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past
grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father had
been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by
no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a
fierce struggle to complete a college education. In the summer-time he
had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter's tuition. He
had worked as clerk in summer hotels, as a surveyor's assistant in
laying street-railways, he had played at private secretary, he had
hawked vegetables about the streets at dawn. Happily, he had no false
pride. Chance moves quite as mysteriously as the tides. On leaving
college he had secured a minor position on one of the daily newspapers,
and had doggedly worked his way up to the coveted position of
star-reporter. Here the latent power of the story-teller, the poet and the
dramatist was awakened; in any other pursuit the talent would have
quietly died, as it has died in the breasts of thousands who, singularly
enough, have not stood in the path of Chance.
Socially, Warrington was one of the many nobodies; and if he ever
attended dinners and banquets and balls, it was in the capacity of
reporter. But his cynical humor, which was manifest even in his youth,
saved him the rancor and envy which is the portion of the outsider.
At length the great city called him, and the lure was strong. He
answered, and the long battle was on. Sometimes he dined, sometimes
he slept; for there's an old Italian saying that he who sleeps dines. He
drifted from one paper to another, lived in prosperity one week and in
poverty the next; haggled with pawnbrokers and landladies, and
borrowed money and lent it. He never saved anything; the dreamer
never does. Then one day the end came to the long lane, as it always
does to those who keep on. A book was accepted and published; and
then followed the first play.
By and by, when his name began to figure in the dramatic news items,
and home visitors in New York returned to boast about the Warrington

"first nights," the up-state city woke and began to recollect things--what
promise Warrington had shown in his youth, how clever he was, and all
that. Nothing succeeds like success, and nobody is so interesting as the
prophet who has shaken the dust of his own country and found honor in
another. Human nature can't help itself: the women talked of his plays
in the reading-clubs, the men speculated on the backs of envelopes
what his royalties were, and the newspaper that had given him a
bread-and-butter pittance for a man's work proudly took it upon itself to
say that its columns had fostered the genius in the growing. This was
not because the editors were really proud of their townsman's success;
rather it was because it made a neat little advertisement of their own
particular foresight, such as it was. In fact, in his own town (because he
had refused to live in it!) Warrington was a lion of no small
dimensions.
Warrington's novel (the only one he ever wrote) was known to few. To
tell the truth, the very critics that were now praising the dramatist had
slashed the novelist cruelly. And thereby hangs a tale. A New York
theatrical manager sent for Warrington one day and told him