The Windlestraw by John Galsworthy — Read

A certain writer, returning one afternoon from rehearsal of his play, sat down in the hall of the hotel where he was staying. "No," he reflected, "this play of mine will not please the Public; it is gloomy, almost terrible. This very day I read these words in my morning paper: 'No artist can afford to despise his Public, for, whether he confesses it or not, the artist exists to give the Public what it wants. ' I have, then, not only done what I cannot afford to do, but I have been false to the reason of my existence."

The hall was full of people, for it was the hour of tea; and looking round him, the writer thought "And this is the Public -- the Public that my play is destined not to please! " And for several minutes he looked at them as if he had been hypnotised. Presently, between two tables he noticed a waiter standing, lost in his thoughts. The mask of the man's professional civility had come awry, and the expression of his face and figure was curiously remote from the faces and forms of those from whom he had been taking orders; he seemed like a bird discovered in its own haunts, all unconscious as yet of human eyes. And the writer thought: "But if those people at the tables are the Public, what is that waiter? How if I was mistaken, and not they, but he were the real Public? " And testing this thought, his mind began at once to range over all the people he had lately seen. He thought of the Founder's Day dinner of a great School, which he had attended the night before. "No," he mused, "I see very little resemblance between the men at that dinner and the men in this hall; still less between them and the waiter. How if they were the real Public, and neither the waiter, nor these people here! " But no sooner had he made this reflection, than he bethought him of a gathering of workers whom he had watched two days ago. "Again," he mused, "I do not recollect any resemblance at all between those workers and the men at the dinner, and certainly they are not like any one here. What if those workers are the real Public, not the men at the dinner, nor the waiter, nor the people in this hall! " And thereupon his mind flew off again, and this time rested on the figures of his own immediate circle of friends.