"Oh no they didn't. Only a few. Turgenief didn't. Tchernichefsky didn't. Dostoiefsky----" "Say. Are they Russians? I never heard their names up there." I looked at J. K. thoughtfully. "No," I said. "You wouldn't. As yet they're not quite crowdy enough. But they are Russians and their ideas made most of the first revolutionists. The whole revolution was started by books." "It wasn't," snapped Joe. "It was taxes. Their taxes were doubled because of the war, and----" "Oh, damn your war taxes, and damn your plows and your corn and hay! You've got a hay mind, that's the trouble with you! You've got so you think that hay and bread and pork and beans are all men live and die for! They don't, Mister Reporter, they die for ideals--freedom, democracy, human rights--which are in 'em so deep that when a big writer sees 'em there and brings 'em out and holds 'em up and says, 'Here! This is you, this is what you want, this is what you believe in!'--your crowd says, 'Sure! Why didn't we see it long ago?' And then they do things that go into headlines! But to be able to write like that a man can't go chasing all over the earth, he's got to quit sneering at art and technique, he's got to learn how to make characters real and build plots that make readers sit up all night to see what becomes of the people he's made! If believing that is a creed, then I'm creedy! I'm willing to throw over everything else, but I'll hang on to this one thing all my life--the fact that big art means working like hell!" "Gee," said J. K. "What an artist." These fights of ours left me weak and sore, as though I'd been back on the terrace at home, listening to my father talk and looking at his harbor. CHAPTER XII When Joe left me in peace at last, just for the sake of the rest and change I turned my attention to music, or, rather, to a musical friend, a young Bohemian composer who lived wholly in a world of his own. I explored this musical world of his, by his side in dark top galleries, in the Cafe Rouge on concert nights, in his room at his piano. How deliciously far away from hay was this chap's feeling for Mozart. With him I could feel sure of myself, of the way I was living for my art, of what my mother way back at the start had called the "fine things" in humanity. I remember the night we heard "Boheme" from the gallery of the Opera Comique. I remember the talk we had late that night, and my walk by the edge of the Gardens home--and the letter and the cable that I found waiting on my desk. The letter was from my father and told me that my mother was dying. The cable told me she was dead. I remember learning that letter by heart on that long ocean voyage home. This was no sudden illness, I learned, my mother had known of it while I was home, known that she had it and that it was fatal. That was the news she had told my father alone that night on the terrace! That was why she had been so eager to get me away to Paris; that was why she had kept me abroad!