Gertrude Atherton

“ M. Dupont wisely remained silent, and Louis resumed, abruptly: "When I shall write as spontaneously as the spring bubbles or the ice melts, when my brain hardly knows what my pen is doing, when I experience that terrific uprush that would drown the more conscious parts of the intellect were it not for the perfect mastery of technique--that is it, monsieur! I am still an infant with my tools. ”

“ This book in its cold intellectual remoteness appealed as little to Louis when he read it in print as it did to the public, and he set himself grimly to work to pour red blood into the veins of his characters and give his next book the rhythm of life as well as of style. Once more he was hailed by the intellectuals, but fell short of popular recognition, which, belonging himself to the intellectual democracy, he estimated far above the few who win their little fame by writing about the creators in art, or even above the artist himself. ”

“ Every man at the table was craning his neck, and M. Constant looked ready to fight twelve duels.
And he, Louis Bac, felt nothing!...
Staring at Calvary, his mind drifted over the events of the past week. He had seen Mademoiselle Berthe every day. On two separate occasions he had talked with her alone in the Dupont library. He had liked and admired her increasingly. He found her full of surprises, subtleties; it seemed to him that just such a young woman had been roaming the dim corridors of his brain, impatiently awaiting his call; and as a wife she would be incomparable. ”

“ Sometimes a murderer is hanged in San Francisco, and this was a miserable, a tramp, with no money or friends to make delay--grace a Dieu! But you are white as death, Monsieur. Who am I to tell you this horrible story when you have just come back from the dead, as it were--"
"It is true that I am overcome. But arrange my bath. I will dress and go to M. Cesar. Oh, my God!"
"But yes, Monsieur."
For a few moments Louis hoped he was dead, that his ice-cold body was yielding up his agonized spirit. ”

“ In spite of his shyness and dislike of women, not only had he nerved himself to the ordeal of meeting Berthe Dupont, but worked himself up to a real desire to fall in love with her, to experience that tremendous emotion from inception to crescendo and liberate the deep creative torrents of his genius. ”

“ Louis sprang to his feet and strode about the room. "It is something more awful still that I have come to tell you. How am I to do it? You, who have always been so kind! My only friend! My God, what a return! But of that I never thought. I was obsessed. It was an inhibition."
"Dear Louis! Come to the point. Are you quoting from your new book--"
"M. Cesar, you do not know what you are dodging! I will try to put my confession in a few words. It was I--I--Louis Bac, who--who--killed Mademoiselle Berthe. There! It is said!"
"My poor boy!" M. Dupont rose and poured out another whiskey-and-soda. ”

“ I am a realist by temperament and mental habit. Nor do I need the great world. Only one thing interests me--crime."
"Crime? Mon Dieu!" The amiable merchant almost choked in his turn, although he savored his duck more slowly than his Lycee guest. "Crime! But you are too young, my son, to be interested in anything so grim. Life is to enjoy. And how can you enjoy with your mind like a morgue?"
"We are not all made to enjoy in the same fashion. I enjoy intensely reading through old volumes of criminal records and trials--my master in psychology has kindly arranged that I shall have access to them. ”

“ Berthe is now twenty, very handsome, very vivacious--a great admirer of M. Louis Bac, celebrated novelist."
The young Frenchman stared at the elderly Frenchman. "Do you wish that I should marry her?"
"For your sake. For hers--to marry a genius whose vampire mistress is his art--ah, well, it is the fate of woman to be sacrificed when they do not sacrifice us. And Berthe's would be no mean destiny. I feel convinced that she alone could make you fall madly in love--"
"I shall never see her again. I have lost my old longing for Paris. What difference where a failure exists and plods? ”

“ Not until now has my brother relented and given his consent to Berthe's taking the long journey. But friends were coming It is fate, my son. Try to fall in love with her--but madly! I, who have loved many times, assure you that the intoxication which tempts lesser men to rhyme should stimulate your great gift to its final expression."
"But marry!" Louis was quite cold. "A wife in my house! Oh no, M. Cesar; I should hate it and her."
"Not if you loved her. And Berthe has subtlety and variety."
"And is far too good for me. I should make a detestable husband." ”

“ Louis struck a match and led the way into the old double parlors he used as his study, and lit a gas-jet. M. Cesar sat down on one of the horsehair chairs and opened his cigar-case.
"Mon Dieu!" he cried. "What a way to live in this amiable world. Fireless, dank, chairs stuffed with rocks. No wonder you look as if you had been in cold-storage."
"Oh, do not trouble yourself to light a cigar, Monsieur. It will go out, I assure you."
He pulled open a drawer of his desk and pointed to a pile of loose gold and half a dozen diamonds of fair size. ”

“ This confidence, which included rage at his own limitations, disgust with the critics who encouraged such miserable failures as he, and invective against fate for planting the fiction imp in what should have been a purely scientific mind and then withholding the power to electrify his talent with genius, was made about every seven months, and M. Cesar always listened with deep concern and sympathy. He loved Louis, who was sweet of nature and the most inoffensive of egoists, but was beginning to regard him as hopeless. ”

“ For Louis had forgotten his original intention merely to terrify. The literary cultures in his brain had suddenly become personal and imperative. He was as ruthless as man ever is when supreme desire and opportunity coincide, whether the lust be for woman or the enemy on the battle-field. He meant to kill Berthe Dupont and gratify the clamoring male within him to the full. ”

“ In a compartment of the desk he found a loose pile of gold and notes. He pocketed the gold, leaving the drawer open. He found Berthe's jewel-box in another drawer, wrenched a few diamonds from their setting and threw a brooch out of the window.
As he was about to leave he felt a sudden and different impulse toward Madame's door. But he was above all things an artist. Why repeat a great experience with possibly failing ardors? And in satiety lay the terrible danger of finding himself at his desk driving a pen heavy with reaction that should be tipped with fire. ”

“ He must tear up his soul by the roots and fill his veins with fire or this new conception would dribble forth in an image so commonplace that he would take it out to Lone Mountain and immure it with himself.
The Dupont house was perched high above the cut that had made a rough hillside into a bland street for the wealthy. The last automobile was rolling away as Louis reached the long flight of covered outer stairs that led up from the street to the house. ”

“ Louis's lip curled. "I have no more intention of being a professor than of being a merchant," he said in his cold, precise voice. "I shall write."
"Ah!" M. Dupont drew a sigh of relief. He had feared the boy would be forbiddingly reticent. "I hoped as much from your letters. Your refinement of mind and style are remarkable for a man of your years. Shall you write plays?" ”

“ It is purely scientific, this interest; the psychology of crime happens to appeal to my peculiar gifts."
"But--that is it--your gifts are literary--but yes! I do not like the idea of wasting them on that lamentable subdivision of human society which one ignores save when held up by a footpad. With but few exceptions it has appealed only to the inferior order of writing talent. Even in France the masters do not condescend. With them crime is an incident, not a motif." ”

“ His eye dropped from the cross to the dark mass of the Catholic cemetery where his parents slept. If his writing faculty should desert him, as M. Cesar had ruthlessly predicted, no power in either world should condemn him to life. He would go out to Lone Mountain, shut himself in the family vault, lie down on the stones, and either drink poison or cut his wrists. ”

“ Many times he had described, with the most searching analysis, that sensation of fear during moments of imminent detection--even that subtle thrill along the nerves--but he was in search of an emotion that should shake his passions loose, and he ran lightly up the stairs, dismissing even the agreeable idea that he was also to experience the sensation of being his own housebreaker, so to speak. ”

“ I hate it--realities. I wish to live in my mind, my imagination; to spend every hour when I do not exercise for my nerves or sleep to refresh my faculty, in writing, writing--that one day shall be creating. ”

“ Now I fear for something more precious still. You look on the verge of collapse."
"It does not matter. Take me quickly to your room."
M. Dupont, who never hurried, and always carried his portly form with a certain stateliness, led Louis out of the library and up one flight of the broad staircase to his temporary quarters. Already, Louis automatically noted, his club bedroom had the intimate and sybaritic look of his famous apartment. He had brought to it silver and crystal for his bureau and little buffet, framed photographs of beautiful women, a Meissonier, and several easy-chairs. ”

“ No man had extracted more juice from the sweet apple of life than he, tasted less of its ashes. It was quite in keeping that he should refuse to have his pleasant pastures sown with horrors a second time.
M. Dupont rose. "I shall send you a sleeping-powder from the chemist's. To-morrow you will take the eleven-thirty train for Santa Barbara, spend a month in my mother's charming home at Montecito, and forget that you are a poor genius subject to plots at the wrong time. That, or a sanatorium. Do you comprehend, my friend?"
Louis turned away with a hopeless gesture. "Oh, very well. ”

“ Let me see those stones." Louis gathered them up and poured them into M. Cesar's steady hand. The old Frenchman felt of them, held them up to the light, flung them back contemptuously into the drawer. "Paste! I thought as much. For why should you buy real diamonds? As for Berthe--what few stones the poor child had were genuine. She could neither afford stones of that size nor would she condescend to wear paste."
"Do you mean to say you will not believe me?" Louis looked sharply at M. Cesar. ”

“ I shall never care for society, for I am too timid and dislike women. But I love the lonely grandeur of nature, and music, and great books and pictures. Have no fear, Monsieur, my mind is not polluted. ”

“ But above all he passionately wished for that intoxication in creation in which consciousness of self was obliterated, the power, as he expressed it, to write one book charged with the magnetism of a burning soul. ”

“ He always felt, despite his love of his work, as cold and deliberate as a mathematician. And yet he spun his complicated plots with the utmost facility. There was no more doubt of his talent, in the minds of those who wrote essays of him in the reviews, than of his psychological insight and his impeccable style.
Poor Louis! Spurred on by his anxious and experienced friend, M. Cesar Dupont, he made a meticulous attempt to adore a little French milliner ”

“ I purpose to write novels--not mere stories--in which character and life shall be revealed in the light of the boldest and the subtlest crimes--murder preferably--and executed in a form and style above cavil--I hope! ”

“ Both his father, Henri Bac II., and his shrewd mother, Antoinette, had been agreed upon giving their studious ascetic little son a true American's chance to rise in the world, and, acting on the advice of their chief patron and the leader of the French colony, M. Cesar Dupont, who offered his escort, had sent the boy to the College Louis le Grand. They never saw their only child again ”

“ It is growing a little too academic, and I, a Frenchman, say that! It would do for the essay, and win the praise of the expiring generation of critics, and the younger but non-creative formalists, but I infer you wish to be read by the public. You would also make money as well as achieve fame. ”