Under the Skylights

Under the Skylights, by Henry
Blake Fuller

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Title: Under the Skylights
Author: Henry Blake Fuller

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER
THE SKYLIGHTS ***

Produced by Eric Eldred, Thomas Berger and the Distributed
Proofreaders team.

HENRY BLAKE FULLER
UNDER THE SKYLIGHTS
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE
The short concluding section of this book--that relating to Dr. Gowdy
and the Squash--is reprinted by permission from Harper's Magazine.
All the remaining material appears now for the first time.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE
LITTLE O'GRADY VS. THE GRINDSTONE
DR. GOWDY AND THE SQUASH.

* * * * *
THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE
* * * * *
THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE

I
With the publication of his first book, This Weary World, Abner Joyce
immediately took a place in literature. Or rather, he made it; the book
was not like other books, and readers felt the field of fiction to be the
richer by one very vital and authentic personality.
This Weary World was grim and it was rugged, but it was sincere and it
was significant. Abner's intense earnestness had left but little room for
the graces;--while he was bent upon being recognised as a "writer," yet
to be a mere writer and nothing more would not have satisfied him at
all. Here was the world with its many wrongs, with its numberless
crying needs; and the thing for the strong young man to do was to help
set matters right. This was a simple enough task, were it but
approached with courage, zeal, determination. A few brief years, if
lived strenuously and intensely, would suffice. "Man individually is all
right enough," said Abner; "it is only collectively that he is wrong."
What was at fault was the social scheme,--the general understanding, or
lack of understanding. A short sharp hour's work before breakfast
would count for a hundred times more than a feeble dawdling
prolonged throughout the whole day. Abner rose betimes and did his
hour's work; sweaty, panting, begrimed, hopeful, indignant, sincere,
self-confident, he set his product full in the world's eye.
Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories--twelve clods of earth
gathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, a
farmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, the
intimate, humble ground; warmed by his own passionate sense of right,
it steamed incense-like aloft and cried to the blue skies for justice. He

pleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of all the
world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilized
society, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths
of slighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and
gross tyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously,
yet reaped so scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the
man who lived indeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his
solicitous eye upon the earth. All this revolted Abner; the indignation
of a youth that had not yet made its compromise with the world burned
on every page. Some of his stories seemed written not so much by the
hand as by the fist, a fist quivering from the tension of muscles and
sinews fully ready to act for truth and right; and there were paragraphs
upon which the intent and blazing eye of the writer appeared to rest
with no less fierceness, coldly printed as they were, than it had rested
upon the manuscript itself.
"Men shall hear me--and heed me," Abner declared stoutly.
A few of those