THE PURPLE INSURGENT.
Clangingharp told Frostembight the only prophetic way to write an epic was to save all the rough drafts, with interlinear corrections. He said your biographer could thus trace the growth of your work from its earliest inception to its final bloom, and the photographic reproductions would do away with the cost of sketches. Frostembight said a man that would write an epic was a lunk-head. Clangingharp started to get up and destroy Frostembight, but he stepped on Marcus Aurelius, and with a rush of words to the throat fell helpless into his chair. Marcus Aurelius was the cat. “Dam that cat,” added Clangingharp.
One night when Clangingharp sat writing, an episode occurred. Clangingharp couldn’t write on an empty stomach, and the verses he made when he was sober were so drab and elegiac that in spite of his remark to Frostembight he threw them away andwent out after cocktails. He could write shriller and hotter stuff when he had had cocktails. Well, one night he sat thinking of what an empty thing a cocktail is. He had been writing verses, and he knew they were regrettable. But he did not go out and have cocktails. It might be told why he didn’t, but what’s the use? You go to a comedy to get away from your business troubles, and the chief clown constantly thrusts under your nose a big wad of stage money. It would simply be dragging in sordid matter that should have no place in a psychological study. It is enough to say he didn’t go out. He sat and plunked drops of purple ink from his pen into a blotter with an insurance advertisement on it that lay submissively on the desk. Then Marcus Aurelius leaped onto the blotter, and a fiendish shine glittered dryly in the epicist’s eye. He noticed the cat was white. Rainy afternoons on the fire-escape had made the beast very white. Clangingharp plunked a drop of royal purple on the tip of Marcus Aurelius’s tail.
The next instant Clangingharp had written:
“And gave him hemorrhage of the soul.”
“Great!” he screeched in a seething cauldron of joy. “Powerful!”
He began to wonder whether or not cattails were as effective as cocktails. He plunked another royalpurple drop onto the cat’s tail, and wrote another line. It was not so good as hemorrhage of the soul, but it was pretty fair:
“And freshet-flushed his hydrant eye.”
For two weeks Clangingharp’s days and nights were dry. He did not go out after cocktails, and as there was a drought on the fire-escape the cat was becoming splendidly regal. The window was kept open, for the weather was hot; but Marcus Aurelius got no nourishment excepting an occasional mouse and what he absorbed from the ink, so he staid in. Clangingharp would sit there for hours and deliberately sling ink at him. Not a growl from Marcus. At last he would take down the folding-bed, and before getting in would remember the pen and wipe it along Marcus’s spine. Not a plaint from the cat: always patient and forgiving.
The epic was growing. It had become so vast now that Clangingharp had long since stopped saving rough drafts, and the complete copy was piled up neatly on his desk. There was so much that he had even ceased reading the whole of it through after writing each new line. The evening came when Clangingharp felt that he could finish the last canto. His heroine was about to get her document so she could be married to the hero, and Clangingharp felt that without stimulants he was scarcely up to writingthe heroine’s final spasm to the jury. It may as well be said here that Clangingharp had been hearing from home lately, so he decided to go out and have them for a last strain. He piled his manuscript fondly on a corner of the desk, dipped his pen thoughtfully into the ink-well, and gazing abstractedly at Marcus, plunked the whole penful into a mute Aurelian eye.
When Clangingharp got back he had had several of them, so at first he did not quite take in what had happened. It seemed to him as if much greater cohesion and consistency had been imparted to the epic by the insertion interlinearly as well as between the pages, of his pot of mucilage. Illustrations had also been sketched over the sheets with the unbridled ink-bottle. The work as a whole had begun to circulate, and was already widespread in its influence. Much of it looked as if the critics had already been at it. Clangingharp stepped to the window and looked out. Golden light from the window in a first-floor flat shone brightly over the bottom of the air-shaft. There, curled up on the cement, lay Marcus Aurelius, a study in purple and dead.
“Dam that cat!” said Clangingharp.
Frank W. Noxon.