Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/70

"My people were hardworking men and women of the lower class. They may have wanted me to grow husky and blossom into a boiler maker; I can't say. Certainly they didn't want me to be a poet. To them that was little above disgrace. When I was a puny child they used to take my beloved poems and burn them. I'd rather they'd beaten me with a knotted rope!

"There's something in the beautiful sound of singing words that meter and rime that fairly intoxicates me. I can't read poetry and stay on earth. It rouses me to ecstasies in which I'm hardly conscious of what I'm doing for hours after. You can see what my own poetry would mean to me? Very well.

"But my people couldn't understand. I realized that, but it didn't deter me. I was too frail for manual labor, unskilled in any trade, uneducated for any profession, and they hadn't the wherewithal to educate me. I got that education myself. My verses didn't sell, however. My father never allowed me to forget that I had never aided in the family expenses; and that was rank heresy to them, something intolerable.

"Life was coming to an unbearable pass for me when a friend of my mother's sent her daughter to visit us. The girl had an unusual amount of beauty. Her people were wealthy, the mother had married a swine of a man who had nothing but money. He had promptly died and left the fortune to her and the girl. The obvious thing happened. My people wanted me to marry the girl. She had romantic ideas, and my poetic ambitions fascinated her even as her physical beauty fascinated me.

"The marriage appeared to me a welcome relief from my stultifying environment. I had a delusion that through love I might find leisure and opportunity to indulge in poetry to my heart's content. So—we were married. But love? I came out of my dreams, post haste! Early after our wedding, Minna—her name was Minna Flett—found that my poems had no market. Love had been the merest pretense with her—she had wanted to display a genius husband. She had counted on my frail health making me submissive to her termagant will. And when she found the world refusing to acclaim me, she let loose all the devils that had been born in her.

"Night and day she lashed me with her tongue. The things some women can think of to say to a man! God forgive her for having married a weakling—I was only a failure living on her money—and many other things beside which such as this pale into insignificance. You—understand? Very well.

"We had been married more than a year when the inharmonious existence we led came to a crisis. I had compiled a volume which had just been rejected for the seventeenth time. With every rejection Minna became more vituperative. This day I mailed the manuscript for the eighteenth time, and had just returned from the errand. I had gotten out all my carbon copies from my files, and all my originals. I was sitting in the library reading them over, polishing, revising; as a jeweler polishes his precious stones, letting them lie in the sun, watching the light scintillate through them, fondling them for very love of them.

"Minna came in the door, watching me for a moment, then began raging at me because she was certain the volume would only be rejected once more. My nerves were on a raw edge. The best of me was in that book. You're an author. You know with what hopes I refined it again and again, and sent it on its way. With what hopes, and dreams, and