How he
wrestled with himself! Sublime thoughts came to him (nearly all about
that girl), and he drove them away, for he knew they beat only against
the march of his story, and, whatever befall, the story must march.
Relentlessly he followed in the track of his men, pushing the dreary
dogs on to deeds of valour. He tried making the lady human, and then
she would not march; she sat still, and he talked about her; he
dumped her down, and soon he was yawning. This weariness was what
alarmed him most, for well he understood that there could be no
treasure where the work was not engrossing play, and he doubted no
more than Pym that for him the treasure was in the tale or nowhere.
Had he not been sharpening his tools in this belief for years? Strange
to reflect now that all the time he was hacking and sweating at that
novel (the last he ever attempted) it was only marching towards the
waste-paper basket!
He had a fine capacity, as has been hinted, for self-deception, and in
time, of course, he found a way of dodging the disquieting truth.
This, equally of course, was by yielding to his impulses. He allowed
himself an hour a day, when Pym was absent, in which he wrote the
story as it seemed to want to write itself, and then he cut this piece
out, which could be done quite easily, as it consisted only of
moralizings.
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