The Inheritors | Page 8

expenses up to a reasonable figure," Callan
reassured me.
"It'll be a good joke for a time," I said. "I'm infinitely obliged to you."
He warded off my thanks with both hands.
"I'll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept," he said, rising. He
seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an
appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had struck
before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he
was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of
labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were
book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate attitudes;
there were piles of little green boxes with red capital letters of the
alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small letters. There
was a writing-lamp that cast an æsthetic glow upon another appropriate
attitude--and there was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and
another with MS. paper already in position.
"My God!" I thought--"to these heights the Muse soars."
As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my
own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty. I
thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see
ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder,
bits of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters, and dust
everywhere. And I knew that my attitude--when I sat at it--would be
inappropriate.
Callan was ticking off the telegram upon his machine. "It will go in the
morning at eight," he said.
CHAPTER THREE
To encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proof-sheets of his
next to read in bed. The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of
him and his jobs. I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to

read myself to sleep with it. I was under obligations to old Cal and I
wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a
sort of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great
Moral Purpose loomed in the background. It would have been a dully
readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable. It was amazing
that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have the
impudence. He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It revolted me
more than a little.
I came to it out of a different plane of thought. I may not have been
able to write then--or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the
flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too,
must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of
thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan had begun
very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in
his youth and had starved a little. It was rather trying to think that
perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I
came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back
upon. It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors
settled down upon me.
I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed to meet Callan's eye. It
was as if he must be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he must
think me a fool who quarrelled with my victuals. He gave no signs of
any such knowledge--was dignified, cordial; discussed his breakfast
with gusto, opened his letters, and so on. An anæmic amanuensis was
taking notes for appropriate replies. How could I tell him that I would
not do the work, that I was too proud and all the rest of it? He would
have thought me a fool, would have stiffened into hostility, I should
have lost my last chance. And, in the broad light of day, I was loath to
do that.
He began to talk about indifferent things; we glided out on to a current
of mediocre conversation. The psychical moment, if there were any
such, disappeared.
Someone bearing my name had written to express an intention of
offering personal worship that afternoon. The prospect seemed to

please the great Cal. He was used to such things; he found them pay, I
suppose. We began desultorily to discuss the possibility of the writer's
being a relation of mine; I doubted. I had no relations that I knew of;
there was a phenomenal old aunt who had inherited the acres and
respectability of the Etchingham Grangers, but she was not the kind of
person to worship a novelist. I, the