Part 7 (1/2)
”Why the Hume?”
”Because he's the fellow who first introduced us.”
”That so?” she murmured, sleepily surprised. ”I thought his name was Moon.”
Her eyes closed, and after a moment the slow, lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep.
Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:
SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED.
BY MARCIA TARBOX.
He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened-- he read on. Half an hour pa.s.sed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.
”Honey,” came in a whisper.
”What, Marcia?”
”Do you like it?”
Horace coughed.
”I seem to be reading on. It's bright.”
”Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book's good. Tell him this one's a world beater.”
”All right, Marcia,” said Horace gently.
Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead-- stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.
All that night the scrawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia's soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams.
He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James pragmatism.
But life hadn't come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia's threatened kiss.
”And it's still me,” he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake in the darkness. ”I'm the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I'm still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed.
”Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get-- and being glad.”
V.
”Sandra Pepys, Syncopated,” with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, appeared serially in Jordan's Magazine, and came out in book form in March. From its first published instalment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject-- a girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage-- treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal.
Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thundered his indors.e.m.e.nt over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.