Journal of Arthur Stirling | Page 2

for that; but after six weeks had passed and I had not heard from him at all, I wrote to a friend to go and see him. It developed that he had moved. The lodging-house keeper could only say that he had left her his baggage, being unable to pay his rent; and that he "looked sick." Where he went she did not know, and all efforts of mine to find him were of no avail. The only person that I knew of to ask was a certain young girl, a typewriter, who had known him for years, and who had worshiped him with a strange and terrible passion--who would have been his wife, or his slave, if he had not been as iron in such things, a man so lost in his vision that I suppose he always thought she was lost in it too. This girl had copied his manuscripts for years, with the plea that he might pay her when he "succeeded"; and she has all of his manuscripts now, except what I have, if she is alive. All that we could learn was that she had "gone away"; I feel pretty certain that she went in search of him.
In addition, all that I have to tell is that on Monday, June 9th last I received a large express package from Arthur. It was sent from New York, but marked as coming from another person--evidently to avoid giving an address of his own. Upon opening it I found two packages, one of them carefully sealed and marked upon the outside, The Captive; the other was the manuscript of this journal, and upon the top of it was the following letter:
MY DEAR ----: You have no doubt been wondering what has become of me. I have been having a hard time of it. I wish I could find some way to make this thing a little easier, but I can not. When you read this letter I shall be dead. There is nothing that I can tell you about it that you will not read in the papers I send you. It is simply that I was born to be an artist, and that as anything else I can not live. The burden that has been laid upon me I can not bear another day. I have told the whole story of it in this book--I have kept myself alive for months, sick and weeping with agony, in order that I might tear it out of my heart and get it written. It has been my last prayer that the struggle my life has been may somehow not be useless. There will come others after me--others perhaps keener than I--and oh, the world must not kill them all!
You will take this manuscript, please, and go over it, and cut out what you like to make it printable, and write a few words to make people understand about it. And then see if any one will publish it. You know more about all these things than I do. If it should sell, keep part of the money for your own work and give the rest to poor Ellen. As to The Captive--I all but burned it, as you will read; but keep it, sealed as I have sealed it, for two years, and then offer it to some publishers--to others than the nine who have already rejected it. If you can not find any one to take it, then burn it, or keep it for love, I do not care which.
I am writing this on Thursday night, and I am almost dead. I mean to get some money to-morrow, and then to buy a ticket for as far up the Hudson as I can go. In the evening I mean to find a steep bank, and, with a heavy dumb-bell I have bought, and a strong rope, I think I can find the peace that I have been seeking.
The first thing that I have to say to you about it is, that when you get this letter it will be over and done, and that I want you, for God's sake, not to make any fuss. No one will find my body and no one will care about it. You need not think it necessary to notify the newspapers--what I'm sending you here is literature and not journalism. I have no earthly belongings left except these MSS., upon which you will have to pay the toll. I have written to M----, a man who once did some typewriting for me, asking him to use a dollar he owes me in putting a notice in one of the papers. I suppose I owe that to the people out West.
I can't write you to-night--before God I can't; my head is going