“It amounts to the same thing,” said the other, cutting himself short in hollow cough, so as not to give up the word. “He would have us withdraw from the world, as if, where any man was, the world was not there in the midst of him!”
“Poor Tolstoï,” said Mr. Kane, going up and shaking hands with the others, “as I understand it, is at present able only to rehearse his rôle, because his family won’t consent to anything else. He’s sold all he has in order to give to the poor, but his wife manages the proceeds.”
“It’s easy enough to throw ridicule on him,” said the gentleman against the window, who now stood up.
“Ithrow no ridicule upon him,” said the tall, gaunt man. “He has taught me at least this, that contempt is of the devil—I beg your pardon, Kane—and I appreciate to the utmost the spiritual grandeur of the man’s nature. But practically, I don’t follow him. We shall never redeem the world by eschewing it. Society is not to be saved by self-outlawry. The body politic is to be healed politically. The way to have the golden age is to elect it by the Australian ballot. The people must vote themselves into possession of their own business, and intrust their economic affairs to the same faculty that makes war and peace, that frames laws, and that does justice. What I object to in Tolstoï is his utter unpracticality. I cannot forgive any man, however good and great, who does not measure the means to the end. If there is anything in my own life that I can regard with entiresatisfaction it is that at every step of my career I have invoked the light of common-sense. Whatever my enemies may say against me, they cannot say that I have not instantly abandoned any project when I found it unpractical. I abhor dreamers; they have no place in a world of thinking and acting.” Ray saw Kane arching his eyebrows, while the other began again: “I tell you”—
“I want to introduce my young friend Mr. Ray,” Mr. Kane broke in.
The old man took Ray’s hand between two hot palms, and said, “Ah!” with a look at him that was benign, if somewhat bewildered.
“You know Mr. Ray, Chapley,” Kane pursued, transferring him to the other, who took his hand in turn.
“Mr. Ray?” he queried, with the distress of the elderly man who tries to remember.
“If you forget your authors in the green wood so easily, how shall it be with them in the dry?” Kane sighed; and now the publisher woke up to Ray’s identity.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes! Of course! Mr. Ray, of—of—Mr. Ray, of”—
“Midland,” Ray suggested, perspiring.
“Why, certainly!” Mr. Chapley pressed his hand with as much apologetic entreaty as he could intimate in that way, and assured him that he was glad to see him; and then he said to the old man, whose name Kane had not mentioned to Ray in presenting him, butwhom Ray knew to be Hughes, “Well, I must be going now. I’m glad to find you looking so much better this morning.”
“Oh; I’m quite a new man—quite a new man!”
“You were always that!” said Mr. Chapley, with a certain fondness. He sighed, “I wish I knew your secret.”
“Stay, and let him expound it to us all!” Kane suggested. “I’ve no doubt he would.”
“No; I must be going,” said Mr. Chapley. “Good-by.” He shook hands with the old man. “Good-by, Kane. Er—good-morning, Mr.—er—Ray. You must drop in and see us, when you can find time.”
Ray bubbled after him some incoherencies about being afraid he could find only too much time. Apparently Mr. Chapley did not hear. He pottered out on the landing, and Ray heard him feeling his way carefully down stairs. It was an immense relief for him to have met Mr. Chapley there. It stamped his own presence in the place with propriety; he was fond of adventure and hungry for experience, but he wished all his adventures and experiences to be respectable. He had a young dread of queerness and irregularity; and he could not conceal from himself that but for Mr. Chapley his present environment was not in keeping with his smooth Philistine traditions. He had never been in an apartment before, much less a mere tenement; at Midland every one he knew lived in his own house; most of the people he knew lived in handsomehouses of their own, with large grass-plots and shade-trees about them. But if Mr. Chapley were here, with this old man who called him by his first name, and with whom he and Mr. Kane seemed to have the past if not the present in common, it must be all right.
Raywoke from his rapid mental formulation of this comforting reassurance to find the old man saying to him, “What is the nature of the work that Chapley has published for you? I hope something by which you intend to advance others, as well as yourself: something that is to be not merely the means of your personal aggrandizement in fame and fortune. Nothing, in my getting back to the world, strikes me as more shamelessly selfish than the ordinary literary career. I don’t wonder the art has sunk so low; its aims are on the business level.”
Mr. Kane listened with an air of being greatly amused, and even gratified, and Ray thought he had purposely let the old man go on as if he were an author who had already broken the shell. Before he could think of some answer that should at once explain and justify him, Kane interposed:
“I hope Mr. Ray is no better than the rest of us; but he may be; you must make your arraignment and condemnation conditional, at any rate. He’s an authorin petto, as yet; Chapley may never publish him.”
“Then why,” said the old man, irascibly, “did you speak of him as you did to Chapley? It was misleading.”
“In the world you’ve come back to, my dear friend,” said Kane, “you’ll find that we have no time to refine upon the facts. We can only sketch the situation in large, bold outlines. Perhaps I wished to give Mr. Ray a hold upon Chapley by my premature recognition of him as an author, and make the wicked publisher feel that there was already a wide general impatience to see Mr. Ray’s book.”
“That would have been very corrupt, Kane,” said the other. “But I owe Mr. Ray an apology.”
Ray found his tongue. “Perhaps you won’t think so when you see my novel.”
“A novel! Oh, I have no time to read novels!” the old man burst out. “A practical man”—
“Nor volumes of essays,” said Kane, picking up a book from the table at his elbow. “Really, as a measure of self-defence, I must have the leaves of my presentation copies cut, at any rate. I must sacrifice my taste to my vanity. Then I sha’n’t know when the grateful recipients haven’t opened them.”
“I’ve no time to read books of any kind”—the old man began again.
“You ought to set up reviewer,” Kane interposed again.
“Oh, I’ve looked into your essays, Kane, here and there. The literature is of a piece with the affectation of the uncut edges: something utterly outdated and superseded. It’s all as impertinent as the demand you make that the reader should do the work of a bookbinder, and cut your leaves.”
“Do you know that I’m really hurt—not for myself, but for you!—by what you say of my uncut edges? You descend to the level of a Brandreth,” said Kane.
“A Brandreth? What is a Brandreth?”
“It is a publisher: Chapley’s son-in-law and partner.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Hughes.
“I spent many hours,” said Kane, plaintively, “pleading with him for an edition with uncut edges. He contended that the public would not buy it if the edges were not cut; and I told him that I wished to have that fact to fall back upon, in case they didn’t buy it for some other reason. And I was right. The edition hasn’t sold, and the uncut edges have saved me great suffering until now. Why not have confined your own remarks, my dear friend, to the uncut edges? I might have agreed with you.”
“Because,” said the old man, “I cannot have patience with a man of your age who takes the mere dilettante view of life—who regards the world as something to be curiously inspected and neatly commented, instead of toiled for, sweated for, suffered for!”
“It appears to me that there is toiling and sweating and suffering enough for the world already,” said Kane, with a perverse levity. “Look at the poor millionnaires, struggling to keep their employés in work! If you’ve come back to the world for no better purpose than to add to its perseverance and perspiration, I could wish for your own sake that you had remained in some of your communities—or all of them, for that matter.”
The other turned half round in his chair, and looked hard into Kane’s smiling face. “You are a most unserious spirit, Kane, and you always were! When will you begin to be different? Do you expect to continue a mere frivolous maker of phrases to the last? Your whole book there is just a bundle of phrases—labels for things. Do you ever intend tobeanything?”
“I intend to be an angel, some time—or some eternity,” said Kane. “But, in the meanwhile, have you ever considered that perhaps you are demanding, in your hopes of what you call the redemption of the race from selfishness, as sheer and mere an impossibility as a change of the physical basis of the soul?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—or, I won’t put it affirmatively; I will put it interrogatively.”
“Yes, that was always your way!”
“I will merely ask you,” Kane went on, without heeding the interruption, “what reason you have to suppose the altruistic is not eternally conditioned in the egoistic, just as the spiritual is conditioned in the animal?”
“What jargon is that?” demanded the old man, throwing one leg over the other, and smoothing the upper one down with his hand, as he bent forward to glower at Kane.
“It is the harmony of the spheres, my dear David; it is a metaphysical variation of the pleasing air that the morning stars sang together; it is the very truth.The altruistic can no more shake off the egoistic in this world than the spiritual can shake off the animal. As soon as man ceases to get hungry three times a day, just so soon will he cease to eat his fellow-man.”
“There is the usual trivial truth in what you say,” Hughes replied, “and the usual serious impiety. You probably are not aware that your miserable paradox accuses the Creative Intelligence.”
“Ah, but use another word! Say Nature, and then where is the impiety?”
“But I decline to use the other word,” Hughes retorted.
“And I insist upon it; I must. It is Nature that I accuse; not the divine nature, or even human nature, but brute nature, that commits a million blunders, and destroys myriads of types, in order to arrive at such an imperfect creature as man still physically is, after untold ages of her blind empiricism. If the human intelligence could be put in possession of the human body, we should have altruism at once. We should not get hungry three times a day; instead of the crude digestive apparatus which we have inherited with apparently no change whatever from the cave-dweller, we should have an organ delicately adjusted to the exigencies of modern life, and responsive to all the emotions of philanthropy. But no! The stomach of the nineteenth century remains helplessly in the keeping of primeval nature, who is a mere Bourbon; who learns nothing and forgets nothing. She obliges us to struggle on with a rude arrangement developed fromthe mollusk, and adapted at best to the conditions of the savage; imperative and imperfect; liable to get out of order with the carefulest management, and to give way altogether with the use of half a lifetime. No, David! You will have to wait until man has come into control of his stomach, and is able to bring his ingenuity to bear upon its deficiencies. Then, and not till then, you will have the Altruistic Man. Until then the egoistic man will continue to eat his brother, and more or less indigest him—if there is such a verb.”
Ray listened with one ear to them. The other was filled with the soft murmur of women’s voices from the further end of the little apartment; they broke now and then from a steady flow of talk, and rippled into laughter, and then smoothed themselves to talk again. He longed to know what they were talking about, laughing about.
“No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium,per se, except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays; but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it come a great many times, and go even oftener.”
“Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Raythat it made him start in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,” and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.
He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room, and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddently fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines of the pocket-book affair on the train.
He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his”—
He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they were, and went out with it.
Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you sit down—if it isn’t too hot here?”
“Oh, it isn’t at all hot,” said Ray, and in fact the air was blowing freely in through the plants at the open window. Then he sat down, as if to prove that it was not too hot; there was no other reason that he could have given for staying, instead of going back to Kane and her father.
“We can keep the windows open on this side,” said Mrs. Denton, “but the elevated makes too much noise in front. When we came here first, it was warm weather; it was stifling when we shut the windows, and when we opened them, it seemed as if the trains would drive us wild. It was like having them in the same room with us. But now it’s a little cooler, and we don’t need the front windows open; so it’s very pleasant.”
Ray said it was delightful, and he asked, “Then you haven’t been in New York long?”
“No; only since the beginning of September. We thought we would settle in New Jersey first, and we did take a house there, in the country; but it was too far from my husband’s work, and so we moved in. Father wants to meet people; he’s more in the current here.”
As she talked, Mrs. Denton had a way of lookingdown at her apron, and smoothing it across her knees with one hand, and now and then glancing at Ray out of the corner of her eye, as if she were smiling on the further side of her face.
“We went out there a little while ago to sell off the things we didn’t want to keep. The neighbors took them.” She began to laugh, and Ray laughed, too, when she said, “We found they had takensomeof them before we got there. They might as well have taken all, they paid us so little for the rest. I didn’t suppose there would be such a difference between first-hand and second-hand things. But it was the first time we had ever set up housekeeping for ourselves, and we had to make mistakes. We had always lived in a community.”
She looked at him for the impression of this fact, and Ray merely said, “Yes; Mr. Kane told me something of the kind.”
“It’s all very different in the world. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a community?”
“No,” said Ray.
“Well,” she went on, “we’ve had to get used to all sorts of things since we came out into the world. The very day we left the community, I heard some people in the seat just in front of me, in the car, planning how they should do something to get a living; it seemed ridiculous and dreadful. It fairly frightened me.”
Ray was struck with the literary value of the fact. He said: “I suppose it would be startling if we couldany of us realize it for the first time. But for most of us there never is any first time.”
Mrs. Denton said: “No, but in the community we never had to think how we should get things to eat and wear, any more than how we should get air to breathe. You know father believes that the world can be made like the Family, in that, and everybody be sure of a living, if he is willing to work.”
She glanced at Ray with another of her demure looks, which seemed inquiries both as to his knowledge of the facts and his opinion of them.
“I didn’t know just what your father’s ideas were,” he said; and she went on:
“Yes; he thinks all you’ve got to do is to have patience. But it seems to me you’ve got to have money too, or you’ll starve to death before your patience gives out.”
Mrs. Denton laughed, and Ray sat looking at her with a curious mixture of liking and misgiving: he would have liked to laugh with her from the poet in him, but his civic man could not approve of her irresponsibility. In her quality of married woman, she was more reprehensible than she would have been as a girl; as a girl, she might well have been merely funny. Still, she was a woman, and her voice, if it expressed an irresponsible nature, was sweet to hear. She seemed not to dislike hearing it herself, and she let it run lightly on. “The hardest thing for us, though, has been getting used to money, and the care of it. It seems to be just as bad with a little as a great deal—the care does; and you have to be thinking about it all the time; we never had to think of it at all in the Family. Most of us never saw it, or touched it; only the few that went out and sold and bought things.”
“That’s very odd,” said Ray, trying the notion if it would not work somewhere into literature; at the same time he felt the charm of this pretty young woman, and wondered why her sister did not come back. He heard her talking with Kane in the other room; now and then her voice, gentle and clear and somewhat high, was lost in Kane’s laugh, or the hoarse plunge of her father’s bass.
“Yes,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think I feel it more than my husband or my sister does; they just have to earn the money, but I have to take care of it, and see how far I can make it go. It’s perfectly distracting; and sometimes when I forget, and do something careless!” She let an impressive silence follow, and Ray laughed.
“Yes, that’s an anxious time for us, even if we’re brought up with the advantages of worldly experience.”
“Anxious!” Mrs. Denton repeated; and her tongue ran on. “Why, the day I went out to New Jersey with my sister to settle up our ‘estate’ out there, we each of us had a baby to carry—my children are twins, and we couldn’t leave them here with father; it was bad enough to leave him! and my husband was at work; and on the train coming home I forgot andgave the twins my pocket-book to play with; and just then a kind old gentleman put up the car window for me, and the first thing I knew they threw it out into the water—we were crossing that piece of water before you get to Jersey City. It had every cent of my money in it; and I was so scared when they threw my pocket-book away—we always saythey, because they’re so much alike we never can remember which did a thing—I was so scared that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just screamed out all about it.” Ray listened restively; he felt as if he were eavesdropping; but he did not know quite how, or when, or whether, after all, to tell her that he had witnessed the whole affair; he decided that he had better not; and she went on: “My sister said it was just as if I had begged of the whole carful; and I suppose it was. I don’t suppose that a person who was more used to money would have given it to a baby to play with.”
She stopped, and Ray suddenly changed his mind; he thought he ought not to let her go on as if he knew nothing about it; that was hardly fair.
“The conductor,” he said, “appeared to thinkanywoman would have done it.”
Mrs. Denton laughed out her delight. “Itwasyou, then. My sister was sure it was, as soon as she saw you at Mr. Chapley’s.”
“At Mr. Chapley’s?”
“Yes; his store. That is where she works. You didn’t see her, but she saw you,” said Mrs. Denton; and then Ray recalled that Mr. Brandreth had sent toa Miss Hughes for the list of announcements she had given him.
“We saw you noticing us in the car, and we saw you talking with the conductor. Did he say anything else about us?” she asked, significantly.
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” Ray answered, a little consciously, and coloring slightly.
“Why,” Mrs. Denton began; but she stopped at sight of her sister, who came in with the empty tumbler in her hand, and set it down in the room beyond. “Peace!” she called to her, and the girl came back reluctantly, Ray fancied. He had remained standing since her reappearance, and Mrs. Denton said, introducing them, “This is my sister, Mr. Ray;” and then she cried out joyfully, “ItwasMr. Ray!” while he bowed ceremoniously to the girl, who showed an embarrassment that Mrs. Denton did not share. “The conductor told him that any woman would have given her baby her pocket-book to play with; and so you see I wasn’t so very bad, after all. But when one of these things happens to me, it seems as if the world had come to an end; I can’t get over it. Then we had another experience! One of the passengers that heard me say all our money was in that pocket-book, gave the conductor a dollar for us, to pay our car-fares home. We had to take it; wecouldn’thave carried the children from the ferry all the way up here; but I never knew before that charity hurt so. It was dreadful!”
A certain note made itself evident in her voice whichRay felt as an appeal. “Why, I don’t think you need have considered it as charity. It was what might have happened to any lady who had lost her purse.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Miss Hughes broke in. “It would have been offered then so that it could be returned. We were to blame for not making the conductor say who gave it. But we were so confused!”
“I think the giver was to blame for not sending his address with it. But perhaps he was confused too,” said Ray.
“The conductor told us it was a lady,” said Mrs. Denton, with a sudden glance upward at Ray.
They all broke into a laugh together, and the girl sprang up and went into another room. She came back with a bank-note in her hand, which she held out toward Ray.
He did not offer to take it. “I haven’t pleaded guilty yet.”
“No,” said Mrs. Denton; “but we know you did it. Peace always thought you did; and now we’ve got you in our power, and youmusttake it back.”
“But you didn’t use it all. You gave a quarter to the old darkey who whistled. You’re as bad as I am. You do charity, too.”
“No; he earned his quarter. You paid him something yourself,” said the girl.
“He did whistle divinely,” Ray admitted. “How came you to think of asking him to change your bill? I should have thought you’d have given it all to him.”
They had a childlike joy in his railery, which theylaughed simply out. “We did want to,” Mrs. Denton said; “but we didn’t know how we could get home.”
“I don’t see but that convicts me.” Ray put out his hand as if to take the note, and then withdrew it. “I suppose I ought to take it,” he began. “But if I did, I should just spend it on myself. And the fact is, I had saved it on myself, or else, perhaps, I shouldn’t have given it to the conductor for you.” He told them how he had economized on his journey, and they laughed together at the picture he gave of his satisfaction in his self-denial.
“Oh, I know thatgoodfeeling!” said Mrs. Denton.
“Yes, but you can’t imagine howsuperiorI felt when I handed my dollar over to the conductor.Goodis no name for it; and I’ve simply gloated over my own merit ever since. Miss Hughes, you must keep that dollar, and give it to somebody who needs it!”
This was not so novel as it seemed to Ray; but the sisters glanced at each other as if struck with its originality.
Then the girl looked at him steadily out of her serene eyes a moment, as if thinking what she had better do, while Mrs. Denton cooed her pleasure in the situation.
“I knew just aswell, when the conductor said it was a lady passenger sent it! He said it like a sort of after-thought, you know; he turned back to say it just after he left us.”
“Well, I will do that,” said the girl to Ray; and she carried the money back to her room.
“Do sit down!” said Mrs. Denton to Ray when she came back. The community of experience, and the wonder of the whole adventure, launched them indefinitely forward towards intimacy in their acquaintance. “We were awfully excited when my sister came home and said she had seen you at Mr. Chapley’s.” Her sister did not deny it; but when Mrs. Denton added the question, “Are you an author?” she protested—“Jenny!”
“I wish I were,” said Ray; “but I can’t say I am, yet. That depends upon whether Mr. Chapley takes my book.”
He ventured to be so frank because he thought Miss Hughes probably knew already that he had offered a manuscript; but if she knew, she made no sign of knowing, and Mrs. Denton said:
“Mr. Chapley gives my sister all the books he publishes. Isn’t it splendid? And he lets her bring home any of the books she wants to, out of the store. Are you acquainted in his family?”
“No; I only know Mr. Brandreth, his son-in-law.”
“My sister says he’s very nice. Everybody likes Mr. Brandreth. Mr. Chapley is an old friend of father’s. I should think his family would come to see us, some of them. But they haven’t. Mr. Chapley comes ever so much.”
Ray did not know what to say of a fact which Mrs. Denton did not suffer to remain last in his mind. She went on, as if it immediately followed.
“We are reading Browning now. But my husbandlikes Shelley the best of all. Which is your favorite poet?”
Ray smiled. “I suppose Shelley ought to be. I was named after him.” When he had said this he thought it rather silly, and certainly superfluous. So he added, “My father was a great reader of him when he was a young man, and I got the benefit of his taste, if it’s a benefit.”
“Why, do you hate to be named Shelley?” Mrs. Denton asked.
“Oh, no; except as I should hate to be named Shakespeare; it suggests comparisons.”
“Yes; but it’s a very pretty name.” As if it recalled him, she said, “My husband was just going out with the twins when you came in with Mr. Kane. He was taking them over to the Park. Do you like cats?” She leaned over and lugged up into her lap a huge Maltese from the further side of her. “My sister doesn’t because they eat sparrows.” She passed her hand slowly down the cat’s smooth flank, which snapped electrically, while the cat shut its eyes to a line of gray light.
“If your cat’s fond of sparrows, he ought to come and live with me,” said Ray. “I’ve got a whole colony of them outside of my dormer-window.”
Mrs. Denton lifted the cat’s head and rubbed her cheek on it. “Oh, we’ve got plenty of sparrows here, too. Where do you live? Down town? Mr. Kane does.”
Ray gave a picturesque account of his foreign hotel;but he had an impression that its strangeness was thrown away upon his hearers, who seemed like children in their contact with the world; it was all so strange that nothing was stranger than another to them. They thought what he told them of life in Midland as queer as life in New York.
The talk went on without sequence or direction, broken with abrupt questions and droll comments; and they laughed a good deal. They spoke of poems and of dreams. Ray told of a fragment of a poem he had made in a dream, and repeated it; they thought it was fine, or at least Mrs. Denton said she did. Her sister did not talk much, but she listened, and now and then she threw in a word. She sat against the light, and her face was in shadow to Ray, and this deepened his sense of mystery in her; her little head, so distinctly outlined, was beautiful. Her voice, which was so delicate and thin, had a note of childish innocence in it. Mrs. Denton cooed deep and low. She tried to make her sister talk more, and tell this and that. The girl did not seem afraid or shy, but only serious. Several times they got back to books, and at one of these times it appeared that she knew of Ray’s manuscript, and that it was going through the hands of the readers.
“And what is the name of your story?” Mrs. Denton asked, and before he could tell her she said, “Oh, yes; I forgot,” and he knew that they must have talked of it together. He wondered if Miss Hughes had read it. “Talking of names,” Mrs. Denton wenton, “I think my sister’s got the queerest one: Peace. Isn’t it a curious name?”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Ray. “The Spanish give it a great deal, I believe.”
“Do they? It was a name that mother liked; but she had never heard of it, although there were so many Faiths, Hopes, and Charities. She died just a little while after Peace was born, and father gave her the name.”
Ray was too young to feel the latent pathos of the lightly treated fact. “It’s a beautiful name,” he said again.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Denton, “and it’s so short you can’tnickit. There can’t be anything shorter than Peace, can there?”
“Truce,” Ray suggested, and this made them laugh.
The young girl rose and went to the window, and began looking over the plants in the pots there. Ray made bold to go and join her.
“Are you fond of flowers?” she asked gently, and with a seriousness as if she really expected him to say truly.
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought,” he answered, thinking how pretty she was, now he had her face where he could see it fully. Her hair was of the indefinite blonde tending to brown, which most people’s hair is of; her sensitive face was cast in the American mould that gives us such a high average of good looks in our women; her eyes were angelically innocent. When she laughed, her lip caught on her upper teeth,and clung there; one of the teeth was slightly broken; and both these little facts fascinated Ray. She did not laugh so much as Mrs. Denton, whose talk she let run on with a sufferance like that of an older person, though she was the younger. She and Ray stood awhile there playing the game of words in which youth hides itself from its kind, and which bears no relation to what it is feeling. The charm of being in the presence of a lovely and intelligent girl enfolded Ray like a caressing atmosphere, and healed him of all the hurts of homesickness, of solitude. Their talk was intensely personal, because youth is personal, and they were young; they thought that it dealt with the different matters of taste they touched on, but it really dealt with themselves, and not their preferences in literature, in flowers, in cats, in dress, in country and city. Ray was aware that they were discussing these things in a place very different from the parlors where he used to enjoy young ladies’ society in Midland; it was all far from the Midland expectation of his career in New York society. He recalled how, before the days of his social splendor in Midland, he had often sat and watched his own mother and sisters about their household work, which they did for themselves, while they debated the hopes and projects of his future, or let their hearts out in jest and laughter. Afterwards, he would not have liked to have this known among the fashionable people in Midland, with whom he wished to be so perfectlycomme il faut.
From time to time Mrs. Denton dropped the cat outof her lap, and ran out to pull the wire which operated the latch of the street door; and then Ray heard her greeting some comer and showing him into the front room, where presently he heard him greeting her father. At last there was a sound below as of some one letting himself in with a latch-key, and then came the noises of the perambulator wheels bumping from step to step as it was pulled up. Mrs. Denton sat still, and kept on talking to Ray, but her sister went out to help her husband; and reappeared with a sleeping twin in her arms, and carried it into the room adjoining. The husband, with his pale face flushed from his struggle with the perambulator, came in with the other, and when he emerged from the next room again, Mrs. Denton introduced him to Ray.
“Oh, yes,” he said; “I saw you with Mr. Kane.” He sat down a moment at the other window, and put his bare head out for the air. “It has grown warm,” he said.
“Was the Park very full?” his wife asked.
“Crowded. It’s one of their last chances for the year.”
“I suppose it made you homesick.”
“Horribly,” said the husband, with his head still half out of the window. He took it in, and listened with the tolerance of a husband while she explained him to Ray.
“My husband’s so homesick for the old Family place—itwasa pretty place!—that he almost dies when he goes into the Park; it brings it all back so. Are you homesick, too, Mr. Ray?”
“Well, not exactly for the country,” said Ray. “I’ve been homesick for the place I came from—for Midland, that is.”
“Midland?” Denton repeated. “I’ve been there. I think those small cities are more deadly than New York. They’re still trying to get rid of the country, and New York is trying to get some of it back. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be a city, big or little, on the whole continent.” He did not wait for any reply from Ray, but he asked his wife, “Who’s come?”
She mentioned a number of names, ten or twelve, and he said, “We’d better go in,” and without further parley he turned toward the curtained avenue to the front room.
Inthe front room the little assemblage had the effect of some small religious sect. The people were plainly dressed in a sort of keeping with their serious faces; there was one girl who had no sign of a ribbon or lace about her, and looked like a rather athletic boy in her short hair and black felt hat, and her jacket buttoned to her throat. She sat with her hands in the side pockets of her coat, and her feet pushed out beyond the hem of her skirt. There were several men of a foreign type, with beards pointed and parted; an American, who looked like a school-master, and whose mouth worked up into his cheek at one side with a sort of mechanical smile when he talked, sat near a man who was so bald as not to have even a spear of hair anywhere on his head. The rest were people who took a color of oddity from these types; a second glance showed them to be of the average humanity; and their dress and its fashion showed them to be of simple condition. They were attired with a Sunday consciousness and cleanliness, though one gentleman, whose coat sleeves and seams were brilliant with long use, looked as if he would be the better for a little benzining, where his moustache had dropped soup and coffee on his waistcoat; he had prominent eyes, with a straining, near-sighted look.
Kane sat among them with an air at once alert and aloof; his arms were folded, and he glanced around from one to another with grave interest. They were all listening, when Ray came in, to a young man who was upholding the single-tax theory, with confidence and with eagerness, as something which, in its operation, would release the individual energies to free play and to real competition. Hughes broke in upon him:
“That is precisely what I object to in your theory. I don’twantthat devil released. Competition is the Afreet that the forces of civilization have bottled up after a desperate struggle, and he is always making fine promises of what he will do for you if you will let him out. The fact is he will do nothing but mischief, because that is his nature. He is Beelzebub, he is Satan; in the Miltonic fable he attempted to compete with the Almighty for the rule of heaven; and the fallen angels have been taking the consequence ever since. Monopoly is the only prosperity. Where competition is there can be finally nothing but disaster and defeat for one side or another. That is self-evident. Nothing succeeds till it begins to be a monopoly. This holds good from the lowest to the highest endeavor—from the commercial to the æsthetic, from the huckster to the artist. As long, for instance, as an author is young and poor”—Ray felt, looking down, that the speaker’s eye turned on him—“he must compete, and his work must be deformed by the struggle; when it becomes known that he alone can do his kindof work, he monopolizes and prospers in the full measure of his powers; and he realizes his ideal unrestrictedly. Competition enslaves, monopoly liberates. We must, therefore, have the greatest possible monopoly; one that includes the whole people economically as they are now included politically. Try to think of competition in the political administration as we now have it in the industrial. It isn’t thinkable! Or, yes! They do have it in those Eastern countries where the taxes are farmed to the highest bidder, and the taxpayer’s life is ground out of him.”
“I think,” said the school-masterly-looking man, “we all feel this instinctively. The trusts and the syndicates are doing our work for us as rapidly as we could ask.”
A voice, with a German heaviness of accent, came from one of the foreigners. “But they are not doing it for our sake, and they mean to stop distinctly short of the whole-people trust. As far back as Louis Napoleon’s rise we were expecting the growth of the corporate industries to accomplish our purposes for us. But between the corporation and the collectivity there is a gulf—a chasm that has never yet been passed.”
“We must bridge it!” cried Hughes.
A young man, with a clean-cut, English intonation, asked, “Why not fill it up with capitalists?”
“No,” said Hughes, “our cause should recognize no class as enemies.”
“I don’t think it matters much to them whether we recognize them or not, if we let them have their ownw’y,” said the young man, whose cockney origin betrayed itself in an occasional vowel and aspirate.
“We shall not let them have their own way unless it is the way of the majority, too,” Hughes returned. “From my point of view they are simply and purely a part of the movement, as entirely so as the proletariat.”
“The difficulty will be to get them to take your point of view,” the young man suggested.
“It isn’t necessary they should,” Hughes answered, “though some of them do already. Several of the best friends of our cause are capitalists; and there are numbers of moneyed people who believe in the nationalization of the telegraphs, railroads, and expresses.”
“Those are merely the first steps,” urged the young man, “which may lead now’ere.”
“They are the first steps,” said Hughes, “and they are not to be taken over the bodies of men. We must advance together as brothers, marching abreast, to the music of our own heart-beats.”
“Good!” said Kane. Ray did not know whether he said it ironically or not. It made the short-haired girl turn round and look at him where he sat behind her.
“We, in Russia,” said another of the foreign-looking people, “have seen the futility of violence. The only force that finally prevails is love; and we must employ it with those that can feel it best—with the little children. The adult world is hopeless; but with the next generation we may do something—everything. The highest office is the teacher’s, but we mustbecome as little children if we would teach them, who are of the kingdom of heaven. We must begin by learning of them.”
“It appears rather complicated,” said the young Englishman, gayly; and Ray heard Kane choke off a laugh into a kind of snort.
“Christ said He came to call sinners to repentance,” said the man who would have been the better for benzining. “He evidently thought there was some hope of grown-up people if they would cease to do evil.”
“And several of the disciples were elderly men,” the short-haired girl put in.
“Our Russian friend’s idea seems to be a version of our Indian policy,” said Kane. “Good adults, dead adults.”
“No, no. You don’t understand, all of you,” the Russian began, but Hughes interrupted him.
“How would you deal with the children?”
“In communities here, at the heart of the trouble, and also in the West, where they could be easily made self-supporting.”
“I don’t believe in communities,” said Hughes. “If anything in the world has thoroughly failed, it is communities. They have failed all the more lamentably when they have succeeded financially, because that sort of success comes from competition with the world outside. A community is an aggrandized individual; it is the extension, of the egoistic motive to a large family, which looks out for its own good against other families, just as a small family does. I have hadenough of communities. The family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work, or by starving to death. But this great family—the real human family—must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing its roots and its branches out wider and over them, till they have no longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of the whole field of production and distribution.”
“Veryslowly,” said the young Englishman; and he laughed.
The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray, at times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could get those queer zealots into a book, they would be amusing material, though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk; he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.
“Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it possible that you have not thought of them?”
Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said, hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, “No, I have never thought of them at all.”
“It is time you did,” said Hughes. “All other interests must yield to them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the name, till the money-stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is honored, not paid.”
The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if he would like to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth; her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.
Hughes went on: “I find it easier to forgive enmity than indifference; he who is not for us is against us in the worst sense. Our cause has a sacred claim upon all generous and enlightened spirits; they are recreant if they neglect it. But we must be patient, even with indifference; it is hard to bear, but we cannot fight it, and we must bear it. Nothing has astonished me more, since my return to the world, than to find the great mass of men living on, as when I left it, in besotted indifference to the vital interests of the hour. I find the politicians still talking of the tariff, just as they used to talk; low tariff and cheap clothes for theworking-man; high tariff and large wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work he starves in his den till he is evicted with a ruthlessness unknown in the history of Irish oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and he hasn’t risen himself yet to the conception of anything more philosophical than more pay and fewer hours.”
A sad-faced man spoke from a corner of the room. “We must have time to think, and something to eat to-day. We can’t wait till to-morrow.”
“That is true,” Hughes answered. “Many must perish by the way. But we must have patience.”
His son-in-law spoke up, and his gloomy face darkened. “I have no heart for patience. When I see people perishing by the way, I ask myself how they shall be saved, not some other time, but now. Some one is guilty of the wrong they suffer. How shall the sin be remitted?” His voice shook with fanatical passion.
“We must have patience,” Hughes repeated. “We are all guilty.”
“It would be a good thing,” said the man with a German accent, “if the low-tariff men would really cut off the duties. The high-tariff men don’t put wages up because they have protection, but they would surely put them down if they didn’t have it. Then you would see labor troubles everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Hughes; “but such hopes as that would make me hate the cause, if anything could. Evil that good may come? Never! Always good, and good for evil, that the good may come more and more! We must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise.”
The spirit which he rebuked had unlocked the passions of those around him. Ray had a vision of them in the stormy dispute which followed, as waves beating and dashing upon the old man; the head of the bald man was like a buoy among the breakers, as it turned and bobbed about, in his eagerness to follow all that was said.
Suddenly the impulses spent themselves, and a calm succeeded. One of the men looked at his watch; they all rose one after another to go.
Hughes held them a little longer. “I don’t believe the good time is so far off as we are apt to think in our indignation at wrong. It is coming soon, and its mere approach will bring sensible relief. We must have courage and patience.”
Ray and Kane went away together. Mrs. Denton looked at him with demure question in her eyes when they parted; Peace imparted no feeling in her still glance. Hughes took Ray’s little hand in his large, loose grasp, and said:
“Come again, young man; come again!”
“Ifever I come again,” Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the street, “I think I shall know it!” He abhorred all sorts of social outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled with a sense of personal injury from Hughes’s asking him to take part in their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of favor done which he must not allow to become painful.
He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains hurtling by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.
He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the avenue and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park. Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space, in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down upon the havoc thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet pleasance.
“Amiable prospect, isn’t it?” said Kane. “It looks as if Hughes’s Afreet has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn’t to judge of it at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!” He passed his hand through Ray’s lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on the scenery. “Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear old friend?”
“Of Mr. Hughes?” Ray asked; and he restrained himself in a pretended question.
“Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes’s friends.”
Ray flashed out upon this. “I think his friends are a lot of cranks.”
“Yes; very good; very excellent good! Theyarea lot of cranks. Are they the first you have met in New York?”
“No; the place seems to be full of them.”
“Beginning with the elderly gentleman whom you met the first morning?”
“Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman.”
Kane smiled with appreciation. “Well, we won’t be harsh on those two. We won’t callthemcranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired dreamers, if you like. As I understand it, we are all dreamers. If we like a man’s dream, we call him a prophet; if we don’t like his dream, we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes inside of six months?”
The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. “What is the matter with the world?” he burst out. “I don’t see that the world is so very sick. Why isn’t it going on very well? I don’t understand what this talk is all about. I don’t see what those people have got to complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his work is worth, and let the best man win. What’s the trouble? Where’s the wrong?”
“Ah,” said Kane, “what a pity you didn’t set forth those ideas when Hughes called upon you!”
“And have all that crew jump on me? Thank you!” said Ray.
“You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew,” said Kane. “I don’t know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn’t help feeling to-day how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David’s were very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don’t like being spoken to in meeting?”
“No, I don’t,” said Ray, bluntly.
“I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don’t think poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly feels that he’s got to hurry, if he’s going to have the kingdom of heaven on earth in his time; and he wants every one to lend a hand.”
For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked stiffly: “Couldn’t he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn’t be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?”
“No, I don’t know that he could,” said Kane, with a pensive singleness rare in him. “Any help of that kind would mean dependence, and David Hughes is proud.”
They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the viaduct carrying the northernrailways; one of its noble arches opened before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent was like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stableyard; a shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped behind its dusty, leafless vines.
“He might be got into that,” said Kane, whimsically, “at no increase of rent, and at much increase of comfort and quiet—at least till the Afreet began to get in his work.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather too much like that eremitism which he’s so down on?” asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.
“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would,” Kane consented, as they struck across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks; the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.
“I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitagesomewhere—a co-operative hermitage, I suppose,” Ray went on. He did not feel bound to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone.
“Ah, yes,” said Kane. “What did you make of the son-in-law?”
“I don’t know. He’s a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke of his work.”
“Why, it’s rather a romantic story, I believe,” said Kane. “He was a young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he was going to find work; he’s a wood-engraver. I believe he’s always had the notion that the world was out of kilter, and it seems that he wasn’t very well himself when he looked in on the Family to see what they were doing to help it. He fell sick on their hands, and the Hugheses took care of him. Naturally, he married one of them when he got well enough, and naturally he married the wrong one.”
“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man”—
Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “Hisnotion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved bythem. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.”
“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.
“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind—the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature—the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest”—
“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.”
“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series ofHard Sayings.”
“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”
“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author ofA New Romeo. Is that what you call it?”
Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:
“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines oftruth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call hershe. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Ray’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”
“Oh, no”—Ray began.
“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane. “Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, Icouldn’tgo. I forgot how repugnant thegolden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away.”
He laughed, and Ray, more reluctantly, laughed with him.
“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I”—
He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.
“Perhapsthatis the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your welcome.”
Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t. You must excuse me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But”—
“You don’t trust me!”
“Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t feel quite up to meeting people just now; I’ll push on down town. I’m rather tired. Good-by.”
Kane held his hand between both his palms. “I wonder what the real reason is! Is it grudge, or pride, or youth?”
“Neither,” said Ray. “It’s—clothes. My boots are muddy, and I’ve got on my second-best trousers.”
“Ah, now you are frank with me, and you give me a real reason. Perhaps you are right. I dare say I should have thought so once.”