He was glad to be allowed to sneak off with a hundred-dollar opal.
Effie May said she liked opals better than anything; there was so much fire in them. Just like they were alive!
True, Mrs. Koreball convinced her, next day, that opals were unlucky, so she never wore the ring again.
Every day Myron wished that they had a baby. They both asserted that they wanted one, Effie May most fervently, but the gods in charge of that department, so gratifyingly prompt with couples who did not want more children and could not afford them, had not seen fit to be generous to the Weagles. And, he fretted, a baby would save Effie May from slipping down into fat uselessness.
After three years of marriage, and four, and five, Effie May accepted him as a necessary part of her good-natured, candy-nibbling existence, except that now and then she tried to be witty about his laboriousness and his preference for sleep after midnight.
He suspected that she had caught this from the witty, the never-sleeping Ora.
22
Luxury yacht round-world cruise, on selling basis many esp new rich pay almost anything to be known as exclusive, like special motors for $20,000. Seven or 8 month cruise cost $100,000 p. person (anyway 60,000). Adv point, you get all luxury (and they really will) of billionaire's yacht that had initial cost fifteen million & fifty to 100,000 yr upkeep for a fraction and meet same kind of society. Social host, a count or earl (real stuff), hostess, princess. All fine suites; family of four with maid, valet, secretary get seven bedrms, 7 baths, huge salon, small sit room servants, private dining rm, balcony desk, own steward and stewardess. Price includes wines & booze, all vintage. Shore excursion not in busses etc. but Rolls-Royces and guides not the usual talking machines you read about but smart natives, young docs, lawyers, college profs, etc. who speak English & introduce passengers into native homes both rich and slum, wh ordinary tourists nev see. Carry big launches for fishing, going up rivers too small for yacht, etc. Yacht at least 12,000 ton or whatever make it biggest in world--social credit just to been on it. Limit to 100--80?--pass. Best chef and grub in world, plus take on native chefs with own supplies--example Hindu chef w curries, Bombay to Bangkok, then in turn Siamese, Chink, Jap, etc. Carry private theat co., dancing instructors, language teachers. Special mail service by aeroplanes. Be fun to plan--spend other people's money--but maybe hell to travel on, with all the fat rich cranks that want their money worth and want the purser to know how much they made.
Now and then, in café confidences, Myron and Ora Weagle had given to their friends curiously similar opinions about the effect of childhood environment upon their characters.
'My father,' said Ora, 'was a sloppy, lazy, booze-hoisting old bum, and my mother didn't know much besides cooking, and she was too busy to give me much attention, and the kids I knew were a bunch of foul-mouthed loafers that used to hang around the hoboes up near the water-tank, and I never had a chance to get any formal schooling, and I got thrown on my own as just a brat. So naturally I've become a sort of vagabond that can't be bored by thinking about his "debts" to a lot of little shop-keeping lice, and I suppose I'm inclined to be lazy, and not too scrupulous about the dames and the liquor. But my early rearing did have one swell result. Brought up so unconventionally, I'll always be an Anti-Puritan. I'll never deny the joys of the flesh and the sanctity of Beauty.'
And, 'My father,' said Myron, 'was pretty easy-going and always did like drinking and swopping stories with the boys, and my mother was hard-driven taking care of us, and I heard a lot of filth from the hoboes up near the water-tank. Maybe just sort of as a reaction I've become almost too much of a crank about paying debts, and fussing over my work, and being scared of liquor and women. But my rearing did have one swell result. Just by way of contrast, it made me a good, sound, old-fashioned New England Puritan.
In 1920, when Myron was forty, and Ora thirty-eight, they had almost exchanged appearances, except that Myron was five inches the taller. He, who had been round-faced and slow, was fine-drawn now, and nervously quick, and his stiffly rearing flaxen hair, as it grew thinner, had become more brown, and lain humbly down under decades of severe brushing. The slim, Shelleyan Ora had grown fat. His face was an orb of complacency, about the dapper moustache of an English police sergeant, and sulky, thickening lips. He was, as ever, darker of tint than Myron, but not in every light evidently so, for after dinner his cheeks were likely to shine greasily.
Myron often looked at you but did not seem to see you. Ora usually saw you but did not seem to look at you.
Myron was incorrigibly and perpetually bewildered by Ora's zig-zag of fortune, and occasionally, for a year at a time, he could not make out at all what Ora was doing and why he should not be even more bankrupt than he was. After Black Slumber; between 1905 and 1920 Ora had five other books published: three novels, one very daring, dealing with a prostitute who was a good girl, one still more daring, dealing with a prostitute who actually was a bad girl, and one comic, with involuntary assistance from Mr. Dooley, Irvin Cobb, George Ade, and P. G. Wodehouse. Then there was his guide to Canada--favourably reviewed by all newspapers not published in Canada--and 'The Scientific Meaning of Dreams: A Handbook that Shows You to Yourself', in which Dr. Freud had been an unconscious collaborator.
Myron was proud at the appearance of each of these, and he earnestly tried to find out what the book-reviews meant. He was excited when he found a publishers' publicity note to the effect that Ora Weagle ('Marcel Lenoir'), author of Slippers, Be Still, reported as one of the twenty-seven best sellers in Augusta, Tallahassee, San José, and Mankato, this past month, was planning a trip around the world on a whaling-vessel. Or had taken a cottage in sight of Bailey's Beach for the summer. Or was learning to fly. He never ceased feeling a little puzzled and unhappy when he learned from Ora that he had no plans whatever for whaling, flying, or viewing Newport.
What Ora did between novels, Myron could not comprehend, and though he admitted that he was not one who could ever understand the ardours and stress of creation, he did timidly wonder if five books in fifteen years was so very much. And the guide-book and dream-book such little thin books, just trickles of mint-flavoured text around large raw hunks of illustration.
Authors generally were inexplicable, felt Myron. He knew that there were differences between individual hotel-keepers, travelling-men, and pot-washers, but it did not occur to him that authors were ever anything save authors. All his life he was to picture Bernard Shaw as Ora Weagle with a beard, and Thoreau as an Ora who drank his whisky and sang 'Frankie and Johnny' in a log cabin instead of in a Fiftieth Street speakeasy.
Whether or no his ponderous and hypocritical brother understood him, Ora was always busy. A fellow had to be, to make a living in a world that rewarded such mutton-heads as hotel-keepers and stockbrokers, but too much feared the mad power of beauty to give decent support to its creative artists. It wouldn't even provide a tiny pension, so that he might be secure, with bare provision for his modest wants--a cot-bed, a chair or two, a little porridge and lobster salad, a quite infrequent jaunt to Europe or China, a few cigarettes and bottles of whisky and champagne, some girls, a refreshing summer in the mountains, a humble little motor car for the gathering of material, just enough of a wardrobe so that the Maestro would not be shamed in the presence of supercilious millionaires, a cocktail now and then, a flat no larger than might be necessary for the entertainment of the combined editors of America, a couple of Monets for inspiration, just a shelf or so of hand-tooled books, with a mere emergency-stock of liqueur brandy, absinthe, Swedish punch, arrack, Burgundy, Chateau Yquem, and perhaps rum--and he was even willing to give up the rum. Yet no one, even among those who pretended to be patrons of genius, was willing to give him such an insignificant pension. And Ora knew. He knew! For he had made it his business to approach every foundation for the cultivation of the arts, every committee in charge of awarding prizes or fellowships, and every publisher rumoured to have gone insane and to have given advances on unwritten books.