Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/163

now blistered and scarred, that had been their very first piece of furniture.

But in the little den upstairs stood his desk, and how he hated it!

Hemming, you see, had literary ambitions, and that desk meant to him every circumstance, every long-drawn torment, of weariness and toil. It had meant much pleasure, too, in hours when his writing had prospered; but how the bitter outnumbered the sweet! How many hundred evenings he had dragged himself to it, in lassitude and lethargy; had forced his drowsy, unwilling mind to the task at hand. How many nights, nodding over the typewriter, he had stumbled on and on. Over his desk he kept, ironically, a letter he had once had from an editor, which said: We like your stories. They have a joyous freshness. You write as though you enjoyed it.

Hemming was no quick and easy composer. His stories emerged slowly, painfully, hammered and wrenched from the stubborn tissues of a weary brain. When his whole soul and body cried out for a comfortable stretch on the couch, with pipe and book, and a gradual, blissful lapse into slumber, he would throw off his coat, stick his head out of the window for a dozen gulps of cool night air, and then sit down at the wheezy old typewriter.