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Read Ebook: The Briary Bush: A Novel by Dell Floyd
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Ebook has 3168 lines and 134347 words, and 64 pages
BOOK ONE: COMMUNITY HOUSE
BOOK TWO: CANAL STREET
BOOK THREE: WOODS POINT
XX "THE NEST-BUILDING INSTINCT" 143
BOOK FOUR: FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET
XXX FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS 210
XL CELEBRATION 264
BOOK FIVE: GARFIELD BOULEVARD
Book One Community House
CHICAGO!
Felix Fay saw with his mind's eye the map on the wall of the railway station--the map with a picture of iron roads from all over the middle west centering in a dark blotch in the corner.
He was sitting at a desk in the office of the Port Royal Daily Record, writing headings on sheaves of items sent in by country correspondents.
And so on.
He was not thinking about those news-items. He was thinking about Chicago....
A year ago, he had determined to leave Port Royal forever--and go to Chicago.
But here he was, still!
He had hoped, a year ago, to find, in the excitement of a new life in Chicago, healing for the desperate hurts of love. If only he had gone then!...
But he hadn't had the money to buy a railway ticket.
He had taken this job on the Record, and settled down to life in Port Royal again as a reporter.
His twenty-first year had gone by.
The hurts of love, so intolerably hard to bear, had healed.
After all, Joyce Tennant had loved him; nothing could ever take away his memories of those starlit evenings on the river, and in the little cabin on their lonely island. She had loved him, she had been his. There was comfort in that thought.... The hurts of love had healed.
But the hurts of pride remained. Loving him, she had chosen to marry another. That wound still ached....
She had seen him all along for what he was--a moonstruck dreamer! She had thought him the fit companion of a reckless love-adventure--that was all.
Her scorn, or what seemed to him her scorn, mirrored and magnified by the secret consciousness of his own weakness, came to assume in his mind the proportions of a final and universal judgment.
A dreamer? And a dreamer only? His egotism could not endure the thought.
The shadow-world of ideas, of theories, of poetic fancies, amidst which he had moved all his life, was not enough. He must live in the real world.
Chicago became for him the symbol of that real world. It was no longer a place of refuge--it was a test, a challenge. He would go there not as a moonstruck dreamer, but as a realist, able to face the hard facts of life.
He would become a different person.
He was tired of being Felix Fay the fool, the poet, the theorist. He would rather be anybody else in the world than that Felix Fay whose ridiculous blunderings he knew by heart.
He could imagine himself in Chicago, a changed person--a young man of action, practical, alert, ruthlessly competitive....
Dreaming of success in Chicago, he sat idly at his desk in Port Royal.
It was late in the afternoon. No one was left in the office but himself and Hastings, the city editor.
"Fay!"
He looked up. The city editor beckoned him over.
"Look at this."
Hastings held in his hand the sheaf of items from Wheaton, over which Felix had casually written a heading half an hour before. Felix held out his hand and took them. Something was wrong. He looked anxiously at the items, written in grey pencil on coarse paper in a straggling hand. The page uppermost was numbered "3." He had hardly glanced at it. Evidently he had overlooked something.
It caught his eye instantly--the second item from the top:
Felix drew a long breath. He certainly had overlooked something! He could see that story, with its headlines, on the front page of the Record--rewritten by himself. It was just the kind of story that he could handle in a way to bring out all its values. And he had had it in his hands--and had let it pass through them, buried in a collection of worthless country items!
"The postmistress at Wheaton," Hastings was saying gently, "is not supposed to know a front-page story. You are supposed to know--that is the theory on which you are hired."
Felix did not reply. There was nothing to be said.
Hastings was looking at him thoughtfully. "I don't know what's got into you, Felix," he said. "I thought you were going to make a good newspaper man. And sometimes I think so still. But mostly--you aren't worth a damn."
"Yes, sir," said Felix. "--I mean, no, I don't think I am, either."
He was going to be fired.... Well, he deserved it. He ought to have been fired long ago. And he was rather glad that it was happening.
Hastings was rather taken aback. "Well," he said, "frankly, I was going to let you go. But--well, there's no harm done this time; we'd already gone to press when that stuff came in. Of course, I don't say that your--your letting it get by was excusable. In fact, I simply can't understand it. But--if you realize--"
So he was not going to be fired after all! Felix was unaccountably sorry.
"If you think you can pull yourself together--" said Hastings. "I'd hate to have you leave the Record. I've always--"
Felix felt desperate. He knew now why he wanted to be fired. It would give him the necessary push into his Chicago adventure. He would never have the courage to leave this job, and venture into the unknown, upon his own initiative. He didn't have any initiative.
"I don't think it's any use, Mr. Hastings," he said, "keeping me on the Record."
Hastings stared at him incredulously.
"I mean," Felix went on hastily, "I've got in a rut. I go through my work mechanically. I don't use my brains. I'm dull. And it's getting worse. I simply can't take any interest in my work."
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