The
weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had
eaten but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked,
my trousers horrid with mire; my humour and all the
circumstances of the time and place lugubriously
attuned. Here were two men who had both spoken fairly
of my work while I was rich and wanted nothing; now
that I was poor and lacked all: "No genius," said the
one; "not enough for an orphan," the other; and the
first offered me my passage like a pauper immigrant,
and the second refused me a day's wage as a hewer of
stone--plain dealing for an empty belly. They had not
been insincere in the past; they were not insincere to-
day: change of circumstance had introduced a new
criterion, that was all.
But if I acquitted my two Job's comforters of
insincerity, I was yet far from admitting them
infallible. Artists had been contemned before, and had
lived to turn the laugh on their contemners. How old
was Corot before he struck the vein of his own precious
metal? When had a young man been more derided (or more
justly so) than the god of my admiration, Balzac? Or,
if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do
but turn my head to where the gold dome of the
Invalides glittered against inky squalls, and recall
the tale of him sleeping there: from the day when a
young artillery sub could be giggled at and nicknamed
Puss-in-Boots by frisky misses, on to the days of so
many crowns and so many victories, and so many hundred
mouths of cannon, and so many thousand war-hoofs
trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty
miles in front of the grand army? To go back, to give
up, to proclaim myself a failure, an ambitious failure-
-first a rocket, then a stick! I, Loudon Dodd, who had
refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been
advertised in the Saint Joseph SUNDAY HERALD as a
patriot and an artist, to be returned upon my native
Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the circuit of my
father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to
sweep offices! No, by Napoleon! I would die at my
chosen trade; and the two who had that day flouted me
should live to envy my success, or to weep tears of
unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.
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