Raydid not go to deliver any of his letters that afternoon; he decided now that it would be out of taste to do so on Sunday, as he had already doubted that it would be, in the morning. He passed the afternoon in his room, trying from time to time to reduce the turmoil of his reveries to intelligible terms in verse, and in poetic prose. He did nothing with them; in the end, though, he was aware of a new ideal, and he resolved that if he could get his story back from Chapley & Co., he would rewrite the passages that characterized the heroine, and make it less like the every-day, simple prettiness of his first love. He had always known that this did not suit the character he had imagined; he now saw that it required a more complex and mystical charm. But he did not allow himself to formulate these volitions and perceptions, any more than his conviction that he had now a double reason for keeping away from Mr. Brandreth and from Miss Hughes. He spent the week in an ecstasy of forbearance. On Saturday afternoon he feigned the necessity of going to ask Mr. Brandreth how he thought a novel in verse, treating a strictly American subject in a fantastic way, would succeed. He really wished to learn something withoutseeming to wish it, about his manuscript, but he called so late in the afternoon that he found Mr. Brandreth putting his desk in order just before starting home. He professed a great pleasure at sight of Ray, and said he wished he would come part of the way home with him; he wanted to have a little talk.
As if the word home had roused the latent forces of hospitality in him, he added, “I want to have you up at my place, some day, as soon as we can get turned round. Mrs. Brandreth is doing first-rate, now; and that boy—well, sir, he’s a perfect Titan. I wish you could see him undressed. He’s just like the figure of the infant Hercules strangling the serpent when he grips the nurse’s finger. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe that fellow recognizes me, and distinguishes between me and his mother. I suppose it’s my hat—I come in with my hat on, you know, just to try him; and when he catches sight of that hat, you ought to see his arms go!”
The paternal rhapsodies continued a long time after they were in the street, and Ray got no chance to bring in either his real or pretended business. He listened with mechanical smiles and hollow laughter, alert at the same time for the slightest vantage which Mr. Brandreth should give him. But the publisher said of his own motion:
“Oh, by-the-way, you’ll be interested to know that our readers’ reports on your story are in.”
“Are they?” Ray gasped. He could not get out any more.
Mr. Brandreth went on: “I didn’t examine the reports very attentively myself, but I think they were favorable, on the whole. There were several changes suggested: I don’t recall just what. But you can see them all on Monday. We let Miss Hughes go after lunch on Saturdays, and she generally takes some work home with her, and I gave them to her to put in shape for you. I thought it would be rather instructive for you to see the different opinions in the right form. I believe you can’t have too much method in these things.”
“Of course,” said Ray, in an anguish of hope and fear. The street seemed to go round; he hardly knew where he was. He bungled on inarticulately before he could say: “I believe in method, too. But I’m sorry I couldn’t have had the reports to-day, because I might have had Sunday to think the suggestions over, and see what I could do with them.”
“Well, I’m sorry, too. She hadn’t been gone half an hour when you came in. If I’d thought of your happening in! Well, it isn’t very long till Monday! She’ll have them ready by that time. I make it a rule myself to put all business out of my mind from 2P.M.on Saturday till Monday 9A.M., and I think you’ll find it an advantage, too. I won’t do business, and I won’t talk business, and I won’t think business after two o’clock on Saturday. I believe in making Sunday a day of rest and family enjoyment. We have an early dinner; and then I like to have my wife read or play to me, and now we have in the baby, and that amuses us.”
Ray forced himself to say that as a rule he did not believe in working on Sunday either; he usually wrote letters. He abruptly asked Mr. Brandreth how he thought it would do for him to go and ask Miss Hughes for a sight of the readers’ reports in the rough.
Mr. Brandreth laughed. “Youareanxious! Do you know where she lives?”
“Oh, yes; I stopped there last Sunday with Mr. Kane on our way to the Park. I saw Mr. Chapley there.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, with the effect of being arrested by the last fact in something he might otherwise have said. It seemed to make him rather unhappy. “Then you saw Miss Hughes’s father?”
“Yes; and all his friends,” Ray answered, in a way that evidently encouraged Mr. Brandreth to go on.
“Yes? What did you think of them?”
“I thought they were mostly harmless; but one or two of them ought to have been in the violent wards.”
“Did Mr. Chapley meet them?”
“Oh, no; he went away before any of them came in. As Mr. Kane took me, I had to stay with him.”
Mr. Brandreth got back a good deal of his smiling complacency, which had left him at Ray’s mention of Mr. Chapley in connection with Hughes. “Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are old friends.”
“Yes; I understood something of that kind.”
“They date back to the Brook Farm days together.”
“Mr. Hughes is rather too much of the Hollingsworth type for my use,” said Ray. He wished Mr. Brandreth to understand that he had no sympathy with Hughes’s wild-cat philosophy, both because he had none, and because he believed it would be to his interest with Mr. Brandreth to have none.
“I’ve never seen him,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I like Mr. Chapley’s loyalty to his friends—it’s one of his fine traits; but I don’t see any necessity for my taking them up. He goes there every Sunday morning to see Mr. Hughes, and they talk—political economy together. You knew Mr. Chapley has been a good deal interested in this altruistic agitation.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Ray.
“Yes. You can’t very well keep clear of it altogether. I was mixed up in it myself at one time: our summer place is on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Massachusetts, and we had ourRomeo and Julietfor the benefit of a social union for the work-people; we made over two hundred dollars for them. Mr. Chapley was a George man in ’86. Not that he agreed with the George men exactly; but he thought there ought to be some expression against the way things are going. You know a good many of the nicest kind of people went the same way at that time. I don’t object to that kind of thing as long as it isn’t carried too far. Mr. Chapley used to see a good deal of an odd stick of a minister at our summer place that had got some of the new ideas in a pretty crooked kind of shape; and then he’s read Tolstoï agood deal, and he’s been influenced by him. I think Hughes is a sort of safety valve for Mr. Chapley, and that’s what I tell the family. Mr. Chapley isn’t a fool, and he’s always had as good an eye for the main chance as anybody. That’s all.”
Ray divined that Mr. Brandreth would not have entered into this explanation of his senior partner and father-in-law, except to guard against the injurious inferences which he might draw from having met Mr. Chapley at Hughes’s, but he did not let his guess appear in his words. “I don’t wonder he likes Mr. Hughes,” he said. “He’s fine, and he seems a light of sanity and reason among the jack-a-lanterns he gathers round him. He isn’t at all Tolstoïan.”
“He’s a gentleman, born and bred,” said Mr. Brandreth, “and he was a rich man for the days before he began his communistic career. And Miss Hughes is a perfect lady. She’s a cultivated girl, too, and she reads a great deal. I’d rather have her opinion about a new book than half the critics’ I know of, because I know I could get it honest, and I know it would be intelligent. Well, if you’re going up there, you’ll want to be getting across to the avenue to take the elevated.” He added, “I don’t mean to give you the impression that we’ve made up our minds about your book, yet. We haven’t. A book is a commercial venture as well as a literary venture, and we’ve got to have a pow-wow about that side of it before we come to any sort of conclusion. You understand?”
“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Ray, “and I’lltry not to be unreasonably hopeful,” but at the same moment his heart leaped with hope.
“Well, that’s right,” said Mr. Brandreth, taking his hand for parting. He held it, and then he said, with a sort of desperate impulse, “By-the-way, why not come home with me, now, and take dinner with us?”
Ray’sheart sank. He was so anxious to get at those opinions; and yet he did not like to refuse Mr. Brandreth; a little thing might prejudice the case; he ought to make all the favor at court that he could for his book. “I—I’m afraid it mightn’t be convenient—at such a time—for Mrs. Brandreth”—
“Oh, yes it would,” said Mr. Brandreth in the same desperate note. “Come along. I don’t know that Mrs. Brandreth will be able to see you, but I want you to see my boy; and we can have a bachelor bite together, anyway.”
Ray yielded, and the stories of the baby began again when he moved on with Mr. Brandreth. It was agony for him to wrench his mind from his story, which he kept turning over and over in it, trying to imagine what the readers had differed about, and listen to Mr. Brandreth saying, “Yes, sir, I believe that child knows his grandmother and his nurse apart, as well as he knows his mother and me. He’s got his likes and his dislikes already: he cries whenever his grandmother takes him. By-the-way, you’ll see Mrs. Chapley at dinner, I hope. She’s spending the day with us.”
“Oh, I’m very glad,” said Ray, wondering if the readers objected to his introduction of hypnotism.
“She’s a woman of the greatest character,” said Mr. Brandreth, “but she has some old-fashioned notions about children. I want my boy to be trained as a boy from the very start. I think there’s nothing like a manly man, unless it’s a womanly woman. I hate anything masculine about a girl; a girl ought to be yielding and gentle; but I want my boy to be self-reliant from the word Go. I believe in a man’s being master in his own house; his will ought to be law, and that’s the way I shall bring up my boy. Mrs. Chapley thinks there ought always to be a light in the nurse’s room, but I don’t. I want my boy to get used to the dark, and not be afraid of it, and I shall begin just as soon as I can, without seeming arbitrary. Mrs. Chapley is the best soul in the world, and of course I don’t like to differ with her.”
“Of course,” said Ray. The mention of relationship made him think of the cousin in his story; if he had not had the cousin killed, he thought it would have been better; there was too much bloodshed in the story.
They turned into a cross-street from Lexington Avenue, where they had been walking, and stopped at a pretty little apartment-house, which had its door painted black and a wide brass plate enclosing its key-hole, and wore that air of standing aloof from its neighbors peculiar to private houses with black doors and brass plates.
Mr. Brandreth let himself in with a key. “There are only three families in our house, and it’s likehaving a house of our own. It’s so much easier living in a flat for your wife, that I put my foot down, and wouldn’t hear of a separate house.”
They mounted the carpeted stairs through the twilight that prevails in such entries, and a sound of flying steps was heard within the door where Mr. Brandreth applied his latch-key again, and as he flung it open a long wail burst upon the ear.
“Hear that?” he asked, with a rapturous smile, as he turned to Ray for sympathy; and then he called gayly out in the direction that the wail came from; “Oh, hello, hello, hello! What’s the matter, what’s the matter? You sit down here,” he said to Ray, leading the way forward into a pretty drawing-room. He caught something away from before the fire. “Confound that nurse! She’s always coming in here in spite of everything. I’ll be with you in a moment. Heigh! What ails the little man?” he called out, and disappeared down the long narrow corridor, and he was gone a good while.
At moments Ray caught the sound of voices in hushed, but vehement dispute; a door slammed violently; there were murmurs of expostulation. At last Mr. Brandreth reappeared with his baby in his arms, and its nurse at his heels, twitching the infant’s long robe into place.
“What do you think of that?” demanded the father, and Ray got to his feet and came near, so as to be able to see if he could think anything.
By an inspiration he was able to say, “Well, heisa great fellow!” and this apparently gave Mr. Brandreth perfect satisfaction. His son’s downy little oblong skull wagged feebly on his weak neck, his arms waved vaguely before his face.
“Now give him your finger, and see if he won’t do the infant Hercules act.”
Ray promptly assumed the part of the serpent, but the infant Hercules would not open his tightly-clinched, wandering fist.
“Try the other one,” said his father; and Ray tried the other one with no more effect. “Well, he isn’t in the humor; he’ll do it for you some time. All right, little man!” He gave the baby, which had acquitted itself with so much distinction, back into the arms of its nurse, and it was taken away.
“Sit down, sit down!” he said, cheerily. “Mrs. Chapley will be in directly. It’s astonishing,” he said, with a twist of his head in the direction the baby had been taken, “but I believe those little things have their moods just like any of us. That fellow knows as well as you do, when he’s wanted to show off, and if he isn’t quite in the key for it, he won’t do it. I wish I had tried him with my hat, and let you see how he notices.”
Mr. Brandreth went on with anecdotes, theories, and moral reflections relating to the baby, and Ray answered with praiseful murmurs and perfunctory cries of wonder. He was rescued from a situation which he found more and more difficult by the advent of Mrs. Chapley, and not of Mrs. Chapley alone, butof Mrs. Brandreth. She greeted Ray with a certain severity, which he instinctively divined was not so much for him as for her husband. A like quality imparted itself, but not so authoritatively, from her mother; if Mr. Brandreth was not master in his house, at least his mother-in-law was not. Mrs. Brandreth went about the room and made some housekeeperly rearrangements of its furniture, which had the result of reducing it, as it were, to discipline. Then she sat down, and Ray, whom she waited to have speak first, had a feeling that she was sitting in judgment on him, and the wish, if possible, to justify himself. He began to praise the baby, its beauty, and great size, and the likeness he professed to find in it to its father.
Mrs. Brandreth relented slightly. She said, with magnanimous impartiality, “It’s a veryhealthychild.”
Her mother made the reservation, “But even healthy children are a great care,” and sighed.
The daughter must have found this intrusive. “Oh, I don’t know that Percy is any great care as yet, mamma.”
“He pays his way,” Mr. Brandreth suggested, with a radiant smile. “At least,” he corrected himself, “we shouldn’t know what to do without him.”
His wife said, drily, as if the remark were in bad taste, “It’s hardly a question of that, I think. Have you been long in New York, Mr. Ray?” she asked, with an abrupt turn to him.
“Only a few weeks,” Ray answered, inwardly wondering how he could render the fact propitiatory.
“Everything is very curious and interesting to me as a country person,” he added, deciding to make this sacrifice of himself.
It evidently availed somewhat. “But you don’t mean that you are really from the country?” Mrs. Brandreth asked.
“I’m from Midland; and I suppose that’s the country, compared with New York.”
Mrs. Chapley asked him if he knew the Mayquayts there. He tried to think of some people of that name; in the meantime she recollected that the Mayquayts were from Gitchigumee, Michigan. They talked some irrelevancies, and then she said, “Mr. Brandreth tells me you havemetmy husband,” as if they had been talking of him.
“Yes; I had that pleasure even before I met Mr. Brandreth,” said Ray.
“And you know Mr. Kane?”
“Oh, yes. He was the first acquaintance I made in New York.”
“Mr. Brandreth told me.” Mrs. Chapley made a show of laughing at the notion of Kane, as a harmless eccentric, and she had the effect of extending her kindly derision to Hughes, in saying, “And you’ve been taken to sit at the feet of his prophet already, Mr. Brandreth tells me; that strange Mr. Hughes.”
“I shouldn’t have said he was Mr. Kane’s prophet exactly,” said Ray with a smile of sympathy. “Mr. Kane doesn’t seem to need a prophet; but I’ve certainly seen Mr. Hughes. And heard him, for that matter.” He smiled, recollecting his dismay when he heard Hughes calling upon him in meeting. He had a notion to describe his experience, and she gave him the chance.
“Yes?” she said, with veiled anxiety. “Do tell me about him!”
At the end of Ray’s willing compliance, she drew a deep breath, and said, “Then he isnota follower of Tolstoï?”
“Quite the contrary, I should say.”
Mrs. Chapley laughed more easily. “I didn’t know but he made shoes that nobody could wear. I couldn’t imagine what other attraction he could have for my husband. I believe he would really like to go into the country and work in the fields.” Mrs. Chapley laughed away a latent anxiety, apparently, in making this joke about her husband, and seemed to feel much better acquainted with Ray. “How are they living over there? What sort of family has Mr. Hughes? I mean, besides the daughter we know of?”
Ray told, as well as he could, and he said they were living in an apartment.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Chapley, “I fancied a sort of tenement.”
“By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, “wouldn’t you like to see our apartment, Mr. Ray”—his wife quelled him with a glance, and he added,—“some time?”
Ray said he should, very much.
Mrs. Brandreth, like her mother, had been growingmore and more clement, and now she said, “Won’t you stay and take a family dinner with us, Mr. Ray?”
Ray looked at her husband, and saw that he had not told her of the invitation he had already given. He did not do so now, and Ray rose and seized his opportunity. He thanked Mrs. Brandreth very earnestly, and said he was so sorry he had an appointment to keep, and he got himself away at once.
Mrs. Chapley hospitably claimed him for her Thursdays, at parting; and Mrs. Brandreth said he must let Mr. Brandreth bring him some other day; they would always be glad to see him.
Mr. Brandreth went down to the outer door with him, to make sure that he found the way, and said, “Then youwillcome some time?” and gratefully wrung his hand. “I saw how anxious you were about those opinions!”
Withan impatience whose intensity he began to feel as soon as he permitted himself to indulge it, Ray hurried across to the line of the elevated road. Now he perceived how intolerable it would be to have staid to dinner with the Brandreths. He did not resent the failure of Mr. Brandreth to tell his wife that he had already asked him when she asked him again; he did not even care to know what his reasons or exigencies were; the second invitation had been a chance to get away. From time to time while Mr. Brandreth was showing him the baby, and then while Mrs. Chapley was setting her mind at rest about her husband by her researches into the philosophy and character of Hughes, he had superficially forgotten that the readers’ opinions of his story were in, while his nether thought writhed in anguish around the question of what their opinions were. When at moments this fully penetrated his consciousness, it was like a sort of vertigo, and he was light-headed with it now as he walked, or almost ran, away from Mr. Brandreth’s door. He meant to see Miss Hughes, and beg for a sight of the criticisms; perhaps she might say something that would save him from the worst, if they were very bad. He imagined a perfect interview, in which he met no one but her.
It was Mrs. Denton who stood at the head of the stairs to receive him when the door promptly opened to his ring; she explained that her husband had put the lock in order since she last admitted him. Ray managed to say that he wished merely to see her sister for a moment, and why, and she said that Peace had gone out, but would be at home again very soon. She said her father would be glad to have him sit down with him till Peace came back.
Ray submitted. He found the old man coughing beside the front window, that looked out on the lines of the railroad, and the ugly avenue beneath.
Hughes knew him at once, and called to him: “Well, young man! I am glad to see you! How do you do?” He held out his hand when he was seated, and when Ray had shaken it, he motioned with it to the vacant chair on the other side of the window.
“I hope you are well, sir?” said Ray.
“I’m getting the better of this nasty cough gradually, and I pick up a little new strength every day. Yes, I’m doing very well. For the present I have to keep housed, and that’s tiresome. But it gives me time for a bit of writing that I have in hand; I’m putting together the impressions that this civilization of yours makes on me, in a little book that I callThe World Revisited.”
Ray did not see exactly why Hughes should sayhiscivilization, as if he had invented it; but he did not disclaim it; and Hughes went on without interruption from him.
“I hope to get my old friend Chapley to bring it out for me, if I can reconcile him to its radical opinions. He’s timid, Chapley is; and my book’s rather bold.”
Ray’s thought darted almost instantly to his own book, and ran it over in every part, seeking whether there might be something in it that was too bold for a timid publisher, or a timid publisher’s professional readers. He was aware of old Hughes monologuing on with the satisfaction of an author who speaks of his work to a listener he has at his mercy.
“My book is a criticism of modern life in all its aspects, though necessarily as the field is so vast, I can touch on some only in the most cursory fashion. For instance, take this whole architectural nightmare that we call a city. I hold that the average tasteless man has no right to realize his ideas of a house in the presence of a great multitude of his fellow-beings. It is an indecent exposure of his mind, and should not be permitted. All these structural forms about us, which with scarcely an exception are ugly and senseless, I regard as so many immoralities, as deliriums, as imbecilities, which a civilized state would not permit, and I say so in my book. The city should build the city, and provide every denizen with a fit and beautiful habitation to work in and rest in.”
“I’m afraid,” said Ray, tearing his mind from his book to put it on this proposition, “that such an idea might be found rather startling.”
“How, startling? Why, startling?” Hughes demanded.
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t it infringe upon private rights? Wouldn’t it be a little tyrannical?”
“What private rights has a man in the outside of his house,” Hughes retorted. “The interior might be left to his ignorance and vulgarity. But the outside of my house is not forme! It’s for others! The public sees it ten times where I see it once. If I make it brutal and stupid,Iam the tyrant,Iam the oppressor—I, the individual! Besides, when the sovereign people is really lord of itself, it can and will do no man wrong.”
Ray had his misgivings, but he would not urge them, because it was a gnawing misery to think of anything but his story, and he let Hughes break the silence that he let follow.
“And so,” the old man said presently, as if speaking of his own book had reminded him of Ray’s, “you have written a novel, young man. And what is your justification for writing a novel at a time like this, when we are all trembling on the verge of a social cataclysm?”
“Justification?” Ray faltered.
“Yes. How does it justify itself? How does it serve God and help man? Does it dabble with the passion of love between a girl and boy as if that were the chief concern of men and women? Or does it touch some of the real concerns of life—some of the problems pressing on to their solution, and needing the prayerful attention of every human creature?”
“It isn’t merely a love-story,” said Ray, glad to getto it on any terms, “though it is a love-story. But I’ve ventured to employ a sort of psychological motive.”
“What sort?”
“Well—hypnotism.”
“A mere toy, that Poe and Hawthorne played with in the old mesmerist days, and I don’t know how many others.”
“I don’t play with it as they did, exactly,” said Ray.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you employ it to as new effect as the scientifics who are playing with it again. But how can you live in this camp of embattled forces, where luxury and misery are armed against each other, and every lover of his kind should give heart and brain to the solution of the riddle that is maddening brother against brother,—how can you live on here and be content with the artistic study of hysteria?”
The strong words of the old man, which fell tingling with emotion, had no meaning for the soul of youth in Ray; he valued them æsthetically, but he could not make personal application of them. He had a kind of amusement in answering: “Well, I’m not quite so bad as you think, Mr. Hughes. I wrote my story several years ago. I don’t suppose I could do anything of the kind, now.”
Hughes’s mouth seemed stopped for the moment by this excuse. He sat glaring at Ray’s bright, handsome face through his overhanging, shaggy eyebrows, andseemed waiting to gather strength for another onset, when his daughter Peace came silently into the room behind Ray.
Her father did not give her time to greet their visitor. “Well,” he called out with a voice of stormy pathos, “how did you leave that poor woman?”
“She is dead,” answered the girl.
“Good!” said Hughes. “So far, so good. Who is living?”
“There are several children. The people in the house are taking care of them.”
“Of course! There, young man,” said Hughes, “is a psychological problem better worth your study than the phenomena of hypnotism: the ability of poverty to provide for want out of its very destitution. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is wrought here every day in the great tenement-houses. Those who have nothing for themselves can still find something for others. The direst want may be trusted to share its crust with those who have not a crust; and still something remains, as if Christ had blessed the bread and broken it among the famishing. Don’t you think that an interesting and romantic fact, a mystery meriting the attention of literary art?”
It did strike Ray as a good notion; something might be done with it, say in a Christmas story, if you could get hold of a tenement-house incident of that kind, and keep it from becoming allegorical in the working out.
This went through Ray’s mind as he stood thinkingalso how he should ask the girl for his manuscript and the criticisms on it without seeming foolishly eager. Her father’s formidable intervention had dispensed him from the usual greetings, and he could only say, “Oh! Miss Hughes, Mr. Brandreth told me I might come and get my story of you—A Modern Romeo—and the readers’ opinions. I—I thought I should like to look them over; and—and”—
“I haven’t had time to copy them yet,” she answered. “Mr. Brandreth wished you to see them; but we keep the readers anonymous, and he thought I had better show them to you all in my handwriting.”
“I shouldn’t know the writers. He said I could see them as they are.”
“Well, then, I will go and get them for you,” she answered. She left him a moment, and he remained with her father unmolested. The old man sat staring out on the avenue, with his head black against its gathering lights.
She gave him the packet she brought back with her, and then she followed him out of the apartment upon the landing, after he had made his acknowledgments and adieux.
“I thought,” she said, timidly, “you would like to know that I had given your dollar for these poor children. Was that right?”
Ray’s head was so full of his story that he answered vaguely, “My dollar?” Then he remembered. “Oh! Oh yes! It was right—quite right! I’m glad you did it. Miss Hughes! Excuse me; but would youmind telling me whether you have happened to look at the story yourself?”
She hesitated, and then answered: “Yes, I’ve read it.”
“Oh, then,” he bubbled out, knowing that he was wrong and foolish, but helpless to refrain, “before I read those things, won’t you tell me—I should care more—I should like so much to know whatyou—I suppose I’ve no right to ask!”
He tried to make some show of decency about the matter, but in fact he had the heart to ask a dying man his opinion, in that literary passion which spares nothing, and is as protean as love itself in its disguises.
“I suppose,” she answered, “that I had no right to read it; I wasn’t asked to do it.”
“Oh, yes, you had. I’m very glad you did.”
“The opinions about it were so different that I couldn’t help looking at it, and then—I kept on,” she said.
“Were they soverydifferent?” he asked, trembling with his author’s sensitiveness, while the implication of praise in her confession worked like a frenzied hope in his brain. “And you kept on? Then it interested you?”
She did not answer this question, but said: “None of them thought just alike about it. But you’ll see them”—
“No, no! Tell me what you thought of it yourself! Was there some part that seemed better than the rest?”
She hesitated. “No, I would rather not say. I oughtn’t to have told you I had read it.”
“You didn’t like it!”
“Yes; I did like parts of it. But I musn’t say any more.”
“But what parts?” he pleaded.
“You mustn’t ask me. The readers’ opinions”—
“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely. “What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd! But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic?Romeo and Julietis melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve quite lost the sense of it. I don’t believe I can make head or tail of those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you thought of it yourself.”
“But I have no right to do that. It would beinterfering with other people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded.
“I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your pardon. Good-night!”
He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him, and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less. Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different. Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest through a prevailing fad. A fifthtouched upon the obvious imitation of Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.
Ray resented, with a keen sense of personal affront, these criticisms in severalty, but their combined effect was utter humiliation, though they were less true taken together than they were separately. At the bottom of his sore and angry heart he could not deny their truth, and yet he knew that there was something in his book which none of them had taken account of, and that this was its life, which had come out of his own. He was aware of all those crude and awkward and affected things, but he believed there was something, too, that went with them, and that had not been in fiction before.
It was this something which he hoped that girl had felt in his story, and which he was trying to get her to own to him before he looked at the opinions. They confounded and distracted him beyond his foreboding even, and it was an added anguish to keep wondering, as he did all night, whether she had really found anything more in the novel than his critics had. As he turned from side to side and beat his pillow into this shape and that, he reconstructed the story after one critic’s suggestion, and then after another’s; but the material only grew more defiant and impossible; if it could not keep the shape it had, it would take no other. That was plain; and the only thing to be done was to throw it away, and write something else; for itwas not reasonable to suppose that Mr. Brandreth would think of bringing the book out in the teeth of all these adverse critics. But now he had no heart to think of anything else, although he was always thinking of something else, while there was hope of getting this published. His career as an author was at an end; he must look about for some sort of newspaper work; he ought to be very glad if he could get something to do as a space man.
Herose, after a late nap following his night-long vigils, with despair in his soul. He believed it was despair, and so it was to all intents and purposes. But, when he had bathed, he seemed to have washed a little of his despair away; when he had dressed, he felt hungry, and he ate his breakfast with rather more than his usual appetite.
The reaction was merely physical, and his gloom settled round him again when he went back to his attic and saw his manuscript and those deadly opinions. He had not the heart to go out anywhere, and he cowered alone in his room. If he could only get the light of some other mind on the facts he might grapple with them; but without this he was limp and helpless. Now he knew, in spite of all his pretences to the contrary, in spite of the warnings and cautions he had given himself, that he had not only hoped, but had expected, that his story would be found good enough to publish. Yet none of these readers—even those who found some meritorious traits in it—had apparently dreamed of recommending it for publication. It was no wonder that Miss Hughes had been so unwilling to tell him what she thought of it; thatshe had urged him so strongly to read the opinions first. What a fool she must have thought him!
There was no one else he could appeal to, unless it was old Kane. He did not know where Kane lived, even if he could have gathered the courage to go to him in his extremity; and he bet himself that Kane would not repeat his last Sunday’s visit. The time for any reasonable hope of losing passed, and then to his great joy he lost. There came a hesitating step outside his door, as if some one were in doubt where to knock, and then a tap at it.
Ray flung it open, and at sight of Kane the tears came into his eyes, and he could not speak.
“Why, my dear friend!” cried Kane, “what is the matter?”
Ray kept silent till he could say coldly, “Nothing. It’s all over.”
Kane stepped into the room, and took off his hat. “If you haven’t been rejected by the object of your affections, you have had the manuscript of your novel declined. These are the only things that really bring annihilation. I think the second is worse. A man is never so absolutely and solely in love with one woman but he knows some other who is potentially lovable; that is the wise provision of Nature. But while a man has a manuscript at a publisher’s, it is the only manuscript in the world. You can readily work out the comparison. I hope you have merely been disappointed in love, my dear boy.”
Ray smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid it’s worse.”
“Then Chapley & Co. have declined your novel definitely?”
“Not in set terms; or not yet. But their readers have all reported against it, and I’ve passed the night in reading their opinions. I’ve got them by heart. Would you like to hear me repeat them?” he demanded, with a fierce self-scorn.
Kane looked at him compassionately. “Heaven forbid! I could repeat them, I dare say, as accurately as you; the opinions of readers do not vary much, and I have had many novels declined.”
“Have you?” Ray faltered with compunction for his arrogation of all such suffering to himself.
“Yes. That was one reason why I began to writeHard Sayings. But if you will let me offer you another leaf from my experience, I will suggest that there are many chances for reprieve and even pardon after the readers have condemned your novel. I once had a novel accepted—the only novel I ever had accepted—after all the publisher’s readers had pronounced against it.”
“Had you?” Ray came tremulously back at him.
“Yes,” sighed Kane. “That is why Chapley is so fond of me; he has forgiven me a deadly injury.” He paused to let his words carry Ray down again, and then he asked, with a nod toward the bed where the young fellow had flung his manuscript and the readers’ opinions, “Might I?”
“Oh, certainly,” said Ray from his depths; and Kane took up the opinions and began to run them over.
“Yes, they have a strangely familiar effect; they are like echoes from my own past.” He laid them down again. “Do you think they are right?”
“Yes. Perfectly! That is”—
“Oh!That is.There is hope, I see.”
“How, hope?” Ray retorted. “Does my differing with them make any difference as to the outcome?”
“For the book, no, perhaps; for you, yes, decidedly. It makes all the difference between being stunned and being killed. It is not pleasant to be stunned, but it is not for such a long time as being killed. What is your story about?”
It astonished Ray himself to find how much this question revived his faith and courage. His undying interest in the thing, by and for itself, as indestructible as a mother’s love, revived, and he gave Kane the outline of his novel. Then he filled this in, and he did not stop till he had read some of the best passages. He suddenly tossed his manuscript from him. “What a fool I am!”
Kane gave his soft, thick laugh, shutting his eyes, and showing his small white teeth, still beautifully sound. “Oh, no! Oh, no! I have read worse things than that! I have written worse than that. Come, come! Here is nothing to beat the breast for. I doubt if Chapley’s will take it, in defiance of their readers; their experience with me has rendered that very improbable. But they are not the only publishers in New York, or Philadelphia even; I’m told theyhave very eager ones in Chicago. Why shouldn’t theroman psychologique, if that’s the next thing, as Mr. Brandreth believes, get on its legs at Chicago, and walk East?”
“I wonder,” Ray said, rising aimlessly from his chair, “whether it would do to call on Mr. Brandreth to-day? This suspense—Do you know whether he is very religious?”
“How should I know such a thing of my fellow-man in New York? I don’t know it even of myself. At times I am very religious, and at times, not. But Mr. Brandreth is rather a formal little man, and a business interview on Sunday, with an agonized author, might not seem exactly decorous to him.”
“I got the impression he wasn’t very stiff. But it wouldn’t do,” said Ray, before Kane had rounded his neat period. “What an ass I am!”
“We are all asses,” Kane sighed. “It is the great bond of human brotherhood. When did you get these verdicts?”
“Oh, Mr. Brandreth told me Miss Hughes had taken them home with her yesterday, and I couldn’t rest till I had his leave to go and get them of her.”
“Exactly. If we know there is possible unhappiness in store for us, we don’t wait for it; we make haste and look it up, and embrace it. And how did my dear old friend Hughes, if you saw him, impress you this time?”
“I saw him, and I still prefer him tohisfriends,” said Ray.
“Naturally. There are not many people, even in a planet so overpeopled as this, who are the peers of David Hughes. He goes far to make me respect my species. Of course he is ridiculous. A man so hopeful as Hughes is thereductio ad absurdumof the human proposition. How can there reasonably be hope in a world where poverty and death are? To be sure, Hughes proposes to eliminate poverty and explain death. You know he thinks—he really believes, I suppose—that if he could once get his millenium going, and everybody so blessed in this life that the absolute knowledge of heavenly conditions in another would not tempt us to suicide, then the terror and the mystery of death would be taken away, and the race would be trusted with its benificent meaning. It’s rather a pretty notion.”
Ray, with his narrow experience, would not have been able to grasp it fully. Now he broke out without the least relevancy to it, “I wonder how it would do to remodel my story so far as to transfer the scene to New York? It might be more popular.” The criticism that one of those readers had made on the helplessness of his fidelity to simple rustic conditions had suddenly begun to gall him afresh. “I beg your pardon. Ididn’tnotice what you were saying! I can’t get my mind off that miserable thing!”
Kane laughed. “Oh, don’t apologize. I know how it is. Perhaps a change of scenewouldbe good; it’s often advised, you know.” He laughed again, and Ray with him, ruefully, and now he rose.
“Oh, must you go?” Ray entreated.
“Yes. You are best alone; when we are in pain weare, alone, anyway. If misery loves company, company certainly does not love misery. I can stand my own troubles, but not other people’s. Good-by! We will meet again when you are happier.”
Mr. Brandrethtried hard to escape from the logic of his readers’ opinions. In the light of his friendly optimism they took almost a favorable cast. He argued that there was nothing absolutely damnatory in those verdicts, that they all more or less tacitly embodied a recommendation to mercy. So far his personal kindliness carried him, but beyond this point business put up her barrier. He did not propose to take the book in spite of his readers; he said he would see; and after having seen for a week longer, he returned the MS. with a letter assuring Ray of his regret, and saying that if he could modify the story according to the suggestions of their readers, Chapley & Co. would be pleased to examine it again.
Ray had really expected some such answer as this, though he hoped against reason for something different. In view of it he had spent the week mentally recasting the story in this form and in that; sometimes it yielded to his efforts in one way or another; when the manuscript came into his hands again, he saw that it was immutably fixed in the terms he had given it, and that it must remain essentially what it was, in spite of any external travesty.
He offered Mr. Brandreth his thanks and his excusesfor not trying to make any change in it until he had first offered it as it was to other publishers. He asked if it would shut him out of Chapley & Co.’s grace if he were refused elsewhere, and received an answer of the most flattering cordiality to the effect that their desire to see the work in another shape was quite unconditioned. Mr. Brandreth seemed to have put a great deal of heart in this answer; it was most affectionately expressed; it closed with the wish that he might soon see Ray at his house again.
Ray could not have believed, but for the experience which came to him, that there could be so many reasons for declining to publish any one book as the different publishers now gave him. For the most part they deprecated the notion of even looking at it. The book-trade had never been so prostrate before; events of the most unexpected nature had conspired to reduce it to a really desperate condition. The unsettled state of Europe had a good deal to do with it; the succession of bad seasons at the West affected it most distinctly. The approach of a Presidential year was unfavorable to this sensitive traffic. Above all, the suspense created by the lingering and doubtful fate of the international copyright bill was playing havoc with it; people did not know what course to take; it was impossible to plan any kind of enterprise, or to risk any sort of project. Men who had been quite buoyant in regard to the bill seemed carried down to the lowest level of doubt as to its fate by the fact that Ray had anovel to offer them; they could see no hope for American fiction, if that English trash was destined to flood the market indefinitely. They sympathized with him, but they said they were all in the same boat, and that the only thing was to bring all the pressure each could to bear upon Congress. The sum of their counsel and condolence came to the effect in Ray’s mind that his best hope was to getA Modern Romeoprinted by Congress as a Public Document and franked by the Senators and Representatives to their constituents. He found a melancholy amusement in noting the change in the mood of those who used to meet him cheerfully and carelessly as the correspondent of a newspaper, and now found themselves confronted with an author, and felt his manuscript at their throats. Some tried to joke; some became helplessly serious; some sought to temporize.
Those whose circumstances and engagements forbade them even to look at his novel were the easiest to bear with. They did not question the quality or character of his work; they had no doubt of its excellence, and they had perfect faith in its success; but simply their hands were so full they could not touch it. The other sort, when they consented to examine the story, kept it so long that Ray could not help forming false hopes of the outcome; or else they returned it with a precipitation that mortified his pride, and made him sceptical of their having looked into it at all. He did not experience unconditional rejection everywhere. In some cases the readers proposed radical and impossible changes, as Chapley & Co.’s readers had done. In oneinstance they so far recommended it that the publisher was willing to lend his imprint and manage the book for the per cent usually paid to authors, if Ray would meet all the expenses. There was an enthusiast who even went so far as to propose that he would publish it if Ray would pay the cost of the electrotype plates. He appeared to think this a handsome offer, and Ray in fact found it so much better than nothing that he went into some serious estimates upon it. He called in the help of old Kane, who was an expert in the matter of electrotyping, and was able from his sad experience to give him the exact figures. They found thatA New Romeowould make some four hundred and thirty or forty pages, and that at the lowest price the plates would cost more than three hundred dollars. The figure made Ray gasp; the mere thought of it impoverished him. His expenses had already eaten a hundred dollars into his savings beyond the five dollars a week he had from theMidland Echofor his letters. If he paid out this sum for his plates, he should now have some ninety dollars left.
“But then,” said Kane, arching his eyebrows, “the trifling sum of three hundred dollars, risked upon so safe a venture asA New Romeo, will probably result in riches beyond the dreams of avarice.”
“Yes: or it may result in total loss,” Ray returned.
“It is a risk. But what was it you have been asking all these other people to do? One of them turns and asks you to share the risk with him; he asks you to risk less than half on a book that you have writtenyourself, and he will risk the other half. What just ground have you for refusing his generous offer?”
“It isn’t my business to publish books; it’s my business to write them,” said Ray, coldly.
“Ah-h-h! Very true! That is a solid position. Then all you have to do to make it quite impregnable is to write such books that other men will be eager to take all the risks of publishing them. It appears that in the present case you omitted to do that.” Kane watched Ray’s face with whimsical enjoyment. “I was afraid you were putting your reluctance upon the moral ground, and that you were refusing to bet on your book because you thought it wrong to bet.”
“I’m afraid,” said Ray, dejectedly, “that the moral question didn’t enter with me. If people thought it wrong to make bets of that kind, it seems to me that all business would come to a standstill.”
“‘Sh!” said Kane, putting his finger to his lip, and glancing round with burlesque alarm. “This is open incivism. It is accusing the whole framework of commercial civilization. Go on; it’s delightful to hear you; but don’t let any oneoverhear you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ray, with sullen resentment, “about incivism. I’m saying what everybody knows.”
“Ah! But what everybodyknowsis just what nobodysays. If people said what they knew, society would tumble down like a house of cards.”
Ray was silent, far withdrawn from these generalities into his personal question.
Kane asked compassionately, “Then you think you can’t venture—risk—chance it? Excuse me! I was trying to find a euphemism for the action, but there seems none!”
“No; I daren’t do it! The risk is too great.”
“That seems to be the consensus of the book trade concerning it. Perhaps you are right.Wouldyou mind,” asked Kane with all his sweet politeness, “letting me take your manuscript home, and go over it carefully?”
“Letyou!” Ray began in a rapture of gratitude, but Kane stopped him.
“No, no! Don’t expect anything!Don’tform any hopes. Simply suppose me to be reading it as a lover of high-class fiction, with no ulterior view whatever. I am really the feeblest of conies, and I have not even the poor advantage of having my habitation in the rocks. Good-by! Good-day! Don’t try to stop me with civilities! Heaven knows how far my noble purpose will hold if it is weakened by any manner of delay.”
Ray lived a day longer in the flimsiest air-castles that ever the vagrant winds blew through. In the evening Kane came back with his story.
“Well, my dear young friend, you have certainly produced the despair of criticism in this extraordinary fiction of yours. I don’t wonder all the readers have been of so many minds about it. I only wonder that any one man could be of any one mind about it longenough to get himself down on paper. In some respects it is the very worst thing I ever saw, and yet—and yet—it interested me, it held me to the end. I will make a confession; I will tell you the truth. I took the thing home, hoping to find justification in it for approaching a poor friend of mine who is in the publishing line, and making him believe that his interest lay in publishing it. But I could not bring myself to so simple an act of bad faith. I found I should have to say to my friend, ‘Here is a novel which might make your everlasting fortune, but most of the chances are against it. There are twenty chances that it will fail to one that it will succeed; just the average of failure and success in business life. You had better take it.’ Of course he would not take it, because he could not afford to add a special risk to the general business risk. You see?”
“I see,” said Ray, but without the delight that a case so beautifully reasoned should bring to the logical mind. At the bottom of his heart, though he made such an outward show of fairness and impersonality, he was simply and selfishly emotional about his book. He could not enter into the humor of Kane’s dramatization of the case; he tacitly accused him of inconsistency, and possibly of envy and jealousy. It began to be as if it were Kane alone who was keeping his book from its chance with the public. This conception, which certainly appeared perverse to Ray at times, was at others entirely in harmony with one of several theories of the man. He had chilled Ray more than once by the cold cynicism of his opinionsconcerning mankind at large; and now Ray asked himself why Kane’s cynicism should not characterize his behavior towards him, too. Such a man would find a delight in studying him in his defeat, and turning his misery into phrases and aphorisms.
He was confirmed in his notion of Kane’s heartlessness by the strange behavior of Mr. Brandreth, who sent for his manuscript one morning, asking if he might keep it a few days, and then returned it the same day, with what Ray thought an insufficient explanation of the transaction. He proudly suffered a week under its inadequacy, and then he went to Mr. Brandreth, and asked him just what the affair meant; it seemed to him that he had a right to know.
Mr. Brandreth laughed in rather a shame-faced way. “I may as well make a clean breast of it. As I told you when we first met, I’ve been wanting to publish a novel for some time; and although I haven’t read yours, the plot attracted me, and I thought I would give it another chance—the best chance I could. I wanted to show it to a friend of yours—I suppose I may say friend, at least it was somebody that I thought would be prejudiced more in favor of it than against it; and I had made up my mind that if the person approved of it I would read it too, and if we agreed about it, I would get Mr. Chapley to risk it. But—I found that the person had read it.”
“And didn’t like it.”
“I can’t say that, exactly.”
“If it comes to that,” said Ray, with a bitter smile,“it doesn’t matter about the precise terms.” He could not speak for a moment; then he swallowed the choking lump in his throat, and offered Brandreth his hand. “Thankyou, Mr. Brandreth! I’m sureyou’remy friend; and I sha’n’t forget your kindness.”
Thedisappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted with that part of his poem, and cut it out.
As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.
When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.
The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.
“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have forgiven me by eating salt with us?”
“There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray,” Mrs. Denton called gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.
There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father’s table, and he thought it good enough, even after several years’ sophistication in cities.
“There was to have been steak,” Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look at her husband, “but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn’t want any steak.”
Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and he asked vaguely, “What did he see?”
“Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their rent. I think that after this, whenAnsel won’t come home by the Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some good from the exercise. He won’t see families set out on the sidewalk in Fifth Avenue.”
Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and Denton said: “The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better. If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves”—
“Oh, I don’t call salt and potatoes luxury,” exactly, said his wife.
Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his sadness. “I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back rent,” he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent again.
Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. “I recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his blessing.”
“Did he look as if he had got rich begging?” Denton asked.
“No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working,” Ray answered, neatly.
Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.
“You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”
Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery. “Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”
“Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”
“No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with an imperfect hold of her irony.
“There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”
“I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. “I wish they would swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show him what his wealth was based on.”
“It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality. The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not take the chance of suffering for himself and his family by relieving the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”
“In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no chance of suffering.”
“No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”
He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript, father,” and brought it to him.
The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.
“Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.
“Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if there was anything to go back to.”
Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent, and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him. Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions. What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”