Love Among the Chickens | Page 2

landlady left Mr.
Garnet. Life seemed very gray to him. He was a conscientious young
man, and he knew that he ought to sit down and do some work. On the
other hand, his brain felt like a cauliflower, and he could not think what
to write about. This is one of the things which sour the young author
even more than do those long envelopes which so tastefully decorate
his table of a morning.
He felt particularly unfitted for writing at that moment. The morning is
not the time for inventive work. An article may be polished then, or a
half-finished story completed, but 11 A.M. is not the hour at which to
invent.
Jerry Garnet wandered restlessly about his sitting room. Rarely had it
seemed so dull and depressing to him as it did then. The photographs
on the mantelpiece irritated him. There was no change in them. They
struck him as the concrete expression of monotony. His eye was caught
by a picture hanging out of the straight. He jerked it to one side, and the
effect became worse. He jerked it back again, and the thing looked as if
it had been hung in a dim light by an astigmatic drunkard. Five minutes'
pulling and hauling brought it back to a position only a shade less
crooked than that in which he had found it, and by that time his
restlessness had grown like a mushroom.
He looked out of the window. The sunlight was playing on the house
opposite. He looked at his boots. At this point conscience prodded him
sharply.
"I won't," he muttered fiercely, "I will work. I'll turn out something,
even if it's the worst rot ever written."
With which admirable sentiment he tracked his blotting pad to its
hiding place (Mrs. Medley found a fresh one every day), collected ink
and pens, and sat down.
There was a distant thud from above, and shortly afterwards a thin
tenor voice made itself heard above a vigorous splashing. The young

gentleman on the top floor was starting another day.
"Oi'll--er--sing thee saw-ongs"--brief pause, then in a triumphant burst,
as if the singer had just remembered the name--"ovarraby."
Mr. Garnet breathed a prayer and glared at the ceiling.
The voice continued:
"Ahnd--er--ta-ales of fa-arr Cahsh-meerer."
Sudden and grewsome pause. The splashing ceased. The singer could
hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the
best.
His hopes were shattered.
"Come," resumed the young gentleman persuasively, "into the garden,
Maud, for ther black batter nah-eet hath--er--florn."
Jerry Garnet sprang from his seat and paced the room.
"This is getting perfectly impossible," he said to himself. "I must get
out of this. A fellow can't work in London. I'll go down to some
farmhouse in the country. I can't think here. You might just as well try
to work at a musical 'At Home.'"
Here followed certain remarks about the young man upstairs, who was
now, in lighter vein, putting in a spell at a popular melody from the
Gaiety Theater.
He resumed his seat and set himself resolutely to hammer out
something which, though it might not be literature, would at least be
capable of being printed. A search through his commonplace book
brought no balm. A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he
places all the insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that
some day he will be able to convert them with magic touch into
marketable plots.

This was the luminous item which first met Mr. Garnet's eye:
Mem. Dead body found in railway carriage under seat. Only one living
occupant of carriage. He is suspected of being the murderer, but proves
that he only entered carriage at twelve o'clock in the morning, while the
body has been dead since the previous night.
To this bright scheme were appended the words:
This will want some working up.
J. G.
"It will," thought Jerry Garnet grimly, "but it will have to go on
wanting as far as I'm concerned."
The next entry he found was a perfectly inscrutable lyric outburst.
There are moments of annoyance, Void of every kind of joyance, In the
complicated course of Man's affairs; But the very worst of any He
experiences when he Meets a young, but active, lion on the stairs.
Sentiment unexceptionable. But as to the reason for the existence of the
fragment, his mind was a blank. He shut the book impatiently. It was
plain that no assistance was to be derived from it.
His thoughts wandered back to the idea of leaving London. London
might have suited Dr. Johnson, but he had come to the conclusion that
what he wanted to enable him to give the public of his best (as the
reviewer of the