By John Galsworthy

In these days no man of genius need starve. The following story of my friend Bruce may be taken as proof of this assertion. Nearly sixty when I first knew him, he must have written already some fifteen books, which had earned him the reputation of “a genius” with the few who know. He used to live in York Street, Adelphi, where he had two rooms up the very shaky staircase of a house chiefly remarkable for the fact that its front door seemed always open. He was a tall, thin man, with a face rather like Mark Twain’s, black eyebrows which bristled and shot up, a bitten drooping grey moustache, and fuzzy grey hair but his eyes were like owl’s eyes, piercing, melancholy, dark brown, and gave to his rugged face an extraordinary expression of a spirit remote from the flesh which had captured it.

The year of which I write had been to my friend Bruce the devil, monetarily speaking. With his passion for writing that for which his Age had no taste – what could he expect? His last book had been a complete frost. He had undergone, too, an operation which had cost him much money and left very weak. When I went to see him that October, I found him stretched out on two chairs, smoking the Brazilian cigarettes. He had a writing-pad on his knee, and sheets of paper scattered all around. The room had a very meagre look. I had not seen him for a year and more, but he looked up at me as if I’d been in yesterday.

“Hallo!” he said, “I went into a thing they call a cinema last night. Have you ever been?”

“Ever been? Do you know how long the cinema had been going? Since about 1900.”

“Well! What a thing! I’m writing a skit on it!”

“How-a skit?”

“Parody-wildest yarn you even read.”

He took up a sheet of paper and began chuckling to himself.

“My heroine,” he said, “is an Octoroon. Her eyes swim, and her lovely bosom heaves. Everybody wants her, and she’s more virtuous than words can say. The situations she doesn’t succumb to would freeze your blood; they’d roast your marrow. She has a perfect devil of a brother, with whom she was brought up, who knows her deep dark secret and wants to trade her off to a millionaire who also has a deep dark secret. Altogether there are four deep dark secrets in my yarn. It’s a corker.”

“What a waste of time!” I said.

“My time!” he answered fiercely. “What’s the use of my time? Nobody buys my books.”

I sat up.

“May I have a look at your skit,” I said, “when you’ve finished it?”

“It is finished. Wrote it straight off. D’you think I could stop and then go on again with a thing like that?” He gathered the sheets and held them out to me. Take the thing – it’s amused me to do it. The heroine’s secret is that she isn’t an Octoroon at all; she’s a De La Casse – purest Creole blood of the South; and her villainous brother isn’t her brother; and the bad millionaire isn’t a millionaire; and her penniless lover is. It’s rich, I tell you!”

“Thanks,” I said dryly, and took the sheets.

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI*

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