Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/23

xiv "I walked on with my ideas suddenly brought out into the clear light of day, and perhaps for the first time in my life I really set before my sober judgment a definition of what I wanted to do and what were the pros and cons of ever doing it. After dinner I burned the manuscript of the masterpiece, as much as I had written, and with it all the notes and jottings I had made. Then I sat down to write a short story for the magazines.

"Of course I knew well enough what sort of stories the magazines wanted. Everyone knows and in a general way everyone can write them. The line of demarcation isn't whether you can or can't, but whether you do or don't. Outside my cottage window was an orchard, and I wrote a story about two lovers who met there for the last time. She thought that she ought to give him up for some insane reason or other, and he thought that she oughtn't. They talked all round it and when, finally, he saw how noble she was and they were parting irrevocably, she suddenly threw herself into his arms and said that she couldn't, and he saw how much nobler she was. There was a dog that looked on and expressed various sympathetic emotions and so forth. There wasn't a word in it that a tram conductor couldn't have written, and from beginning to end it didn't contain a page whose removal would have made the slightest difference to the sense. It was soothing in the way that the sound of a distant circular saw, or watching an endless chain of dredging buckets at work, soothes. A reader falling asleep over the story (an extremely probable occurrence) would wake up without the faintest notion of whether he had read all of it, some of it, or none of it. I didn't even trouble to find names for the two imbeciles: they were just 'the Man' and 'the Girl.'

"It took a single afternoon to write that four-thousand-word story—of course there was no need to read it over