No; my only chance is 'to be discovered' by a magazine or a publishing house or somebody, and get a bid of some kind.""Well, there is the Centennial Company. They have taken an interest in you, Condy. You must follow that right up and keep your name before them all the time. Have you sent them 'A Victory Over Death' yet?"Condy sat down to his eggs and coffee the next morning in the hotel, harried with a certain sense of depression and disappointment for which he could assign no cause. Nothing seemed to interest him. The newspaper was dull. He could look forward to no pleasure in his day's work; and what was the matter with the sun that morning? As he walked down to the office he noted no cloud in the sky, but the brightness was gone from the day. He sat down to his desk and attacked his work, but "copy" would not come. The sporting editor and his inane jokes harassed him beyond expression. Just the sight of the clipping editor's back was an irritation. The office boy was a mere incentive to profanity.
There was no spring in Condy that morning, no elasticity, none of his natural buoyancy. As the day wore on, his ennui increased;his luncheon at the club was tasteless, tobacco had lost its charm. He ordered a cocktail in the wine-room, and put it aside with a wry face.
The afternoon was one long tedium. At every hour he flung his pencil down, utterly unable to formulate the next sentence of his article, and, his hands in his pockets, gazed gloomily out of the window over the wilderness of roofs--grimy, dirty, ugly roofs that spread out below. He craved diversion, amusement, excitement.
Something there was that he wanted with all his heart and soul;yet he was quite unable to say what it was. Something was gone from him to-day that he had possessed yesterday, and he knew he would not regain it on the morrow, nor the next day, nor the day after that. What was it? He could not say. For half an hour he imagined he was going to be sick. His mother was not to be at home that evening, and Condy dined at his club in the hopes of finding some one with whom he could go to the theatre later on in the evening. Sargeant joined him over his coffee and cigarette, but declined to go with him to the theatre.
"Another game on to-night?" asked Condy.
"I suppose so," admitted the other.
"I guess I'll join you to-night," said Condy. "I've had the blue devils since morning, and I've got to have something to drive them off.""Don't let me urge you, you know," returned Sargeant.
"Oh, that's all right!" Condy assured him. "My time's about up, anyways."An hour later, just as he, Sargeant, and the other men of their "set" were in the act of going upstairs to the card-rooms, a hall-boy gave Condy a note, at that moment brought by a messenger, who was waiting for an answer. It was from Blix. She wrote:
"Don't you want to come up and play cards with me to-night? We haven't had a game in over a week?""How did she know?" thought Condy to himself--"how could she tell?" Aloud, he said:
"I can't join you fellows, after all. 'Despatch from the managing editor.' Some special detail or other."For the first time since the previous evening Condy felt his spirits rise as he set off toward the Washington Street hill. But though he and Blix spent as merry an evening as they remembered in a long time, his nameless, formless irritation returned upon him almost as soon as he had bidden her good-night. It stayed with him all through the week, and told upon his work. As a result, three of his articles were thrown out by the editor.
"We can't run such rot as that in the paper," the chief had said.
"Can't you give us a story?"
"Oh, I've got a kind of a yarn you can run if you like," answered Condy, his week's depression at its very lowest.
"A Victory Over Death" was published in the following Sunday's supplement of the "Times," with illustrations by one of the staff artists. It attracted not the least attention.
Just before he went to bed the Sunday evening of its appearance, Condy read it over again for the last time.
"It's a rotten failure," he muttered gloomily as he cast the paper from him. "Simple drivel. I wonder what Blix will think of it.
I wonder if I amount to a hill of beans. I wonder WHAT she wants to go East for, anyway."
