walk, walk, walk!

(_She speaks._)

Walking, walking, oh, the curse of walking!
Slouching round the grim square, shuffling up the street,
Slinking down the by-way, all my graces hawking,
Offering my body to each man I meet.
Peering in the gin-shop where the lads are drinking,
Trying to look gay-like, crazy with the blues;
Halting in a doorway, shuddering and shrinking
(Oh, my draggled feather and my thin, wet shoes).
Here's a drunken drover: "Hullo, there, old dearie!"
No, he only curses, can't be got to talk. . . .
On and on till daylight, famished, wet and weary,
God in Heaven help me as I walk, walk, walk!

III

The Cafe de la Source,

Late in July 1914.

The other evening MacBean was in a pessimistic mood.

"Why do you write?" he asked me gloomily.

"Obviously," I said, "to avoid starving. To produce something that will
buy me food, shelter, raiment."

"If you were a millionaire, would you still write?"

"Yes," I said, after a moment's thought. "You get an idea. It haunts
you. It seems to clamor for expression. It begins to obsess you. At
last in desperation you embody it in a poem, an essay, a story. There!
it is disposed of. You are at rest. It troubles you no more. Yes; if I
were a millionaire I should write, if it were only to escape from my
ideas."

"You have given two reasons why men write," said MacBean: "for gain,
for self-expression. Then, again, some men write to amuse themselves,
some because they conceive they have a mission in the world; some
because they have real genius, and are conscious they can enrich the
literature of all time. I must say I don't know of any belonging to the
latter class. We are living in an age of mediocrity. There is no writer
of to-day who will be read twenty years after he is dead. That's a truth
that must come home to the best of them."

"I guess they're not losing much sleep over it," I said.

"Take novelists," continued MacBean. "The line of first-class novelists
ended with Dickens and Thackeray. Then followed some of the second
class, Stevenson, Meredith, Hardy. And to-day we have three novelists
of the third class, good, capable craftsmen. We can trust ourselves
comfortably in their hands. We read and enjoy them, but do you think
our children will?"

"Yours won't, anyway," I said.

"Don't be too sure. I may surprise you yet. I may get married and turn
_b