A purposehad instantly formed itself in Ray’s mind which he instantly set himself to carry out. It was none the less a burden because he tried to think it heroic and knew it to be fantastic; and it was in a mood of equally blended devotion and resentment that he disciplined himself to fulfil it. It was shocking to criticise the dying man’s prayer from any such point of view, but he could not help doing so, and censuring it for a want of taste, for a want of consideration. He did not account for the hope of good to the world which Hughes must have had in urging him to befriend his book; he could only regard it as a piece of literature, and judge the author’s motives by his own, which he was fully aware were primarily selfish.
But he went direct to Mr. Brandreth and laid the matter before him.
“Now I’m going to suggest something,” he hurried on, “which may strike you as ridiculous, but I’m thoroughly in earnest about it. I’ve read Mr. Hughes’s book, first and last, all through, and it’s good literature, I can assure you of that. I don’t know about the principles in it, but I know it’s very original and from a perfectly new stand-point, and I believe it would make a great hit.”
Mr. Brandreth listened, evidently shaken. “I couldn’t do it, now. I’m making a venture with your book.”
“That’s just what I’m coming to. Don’t make your venture with my book; make it with his! I solemnly believe that his would be the safest venture of the two; I believe it would stand two chances to one of mine.”
“Well, I’ll look at it for the fall.”
“It will be too late, then, as far as Hughes is concerned. It’s now or never, with him! You want to come out with a book that will draw attention to your house, as well as succeed. I believe that Hughes’s book will be an immense success. It has a taking name, and it’s a novel and taking conception. It’ll make no end of talk.”
“It’s too late,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I couldn’t take such a book as that without passing it round among all our readers, and you know what that means. Besides, I’ve begun to make my plans for getting out your book at once. There isn’t any time to lose. I’ve sent out a lot of literary notes, and you’ll see them in every leading paper to-morrow morning. I’ll have Mr. Hughes’s book faithfully examined, and if I can see my way to it—I tell you, I believe I shall make a success of theModern Romeo. I like the title better and better. I think you’ll be pleased with the way I’ve primed the press. I’ve tried to avoid all vulgar claptrap, and yet I believe I’ve contrived to pique the public curiosity.”
He went on to tell Ray some of the things he had said in his paragraphs, and Ray listened with that mingled shame and pleasure which the artist must feel whenever the commercial side of his life presents itself.
“I kept Miss Hughes pretty late this afternoon, working the things into shape, so as to get them to the papers at once. I just give her the main points, and she has such a neat touch.”
Ray left his publisher with a light heart, and a pious sense of the divine favor. He had conceived of a difficult duty, and he had discharged it with unflinching courage. He had kept his word to Hughes; he had done all that he could for him, even to offering his own chance of fame and fortune a sacrifice to him. Now he could do no more, and if he could not help being glad that the sacrifice had not been accepted of him, he was not to be blamed. He was very much to be praised, and he rewarded himself with a full recognition of his virtue; he imagined some words, few but rare, from Peace, expressing her sense of his magnanimity, when she came to know of it. He hoped that a fact so creditable to him, and so characteristic, would not escape the notice of his biographer. He wished that Hughes could know what he had done, and in his revery he contrived that his generous endeavor should be brought to the old man’s knowledge; he had Hughes say that such an action was more to him than the publication of his book.
Throughout his transport of self-satisfaction there ran a nether torment of question whether Peace Hughescould possibly suppose that he was privy to that paragraphing about his book, and this finally worked to the surface, and become his whole mood. After his joyful riot it was this that kept him awake till morning, that poisoned all his pleasure in his escape from self-sacrifice. He could only pacify himself and get some sleep at last by promising to stop at the publisher’s on his way down to theEvery Eveningoffice in the morning, and beseech her to believe that he had nothing to do with priming the press, and that he wished Mr. Brandreth had not told him of it. Nothing less than this was due him in the character that he desired to appear in hereafter.
He reached the publisher’s office before Mr. Brandreth came down, and when he said he would like to see Miss Hughes, the clerk answered that Miss Hughes had sent word that her father was not so well, and she would not be down that day.
“He’s pretty low, I believe,” the clerk volunteered.
“I’m afraid so,” said Ray.
He asked if the clerk would call a messenger to take a note from him to his office, and when he had despatched it he went up to see Hughes.
“Did you get our message?” Peace asked him the first thing.
“No,” said Ray. “What message?”
“That we sent to your office. He has been wanting to see you ever since he woke this morning. I knew you would come!”
“O yes. I went to inquire of you about him atChapley’s, and when I heard that he was worse, of course I came. Is he much worse?”
“He can’t live at all. The doctor says it’s no use. He wants to see you. Will you come in?”
“Peace!” Ray hesitated. “Tell me! Is it about his book?”
“Yes, something about that. He wishes to speak with you.”
“Oh, Peace! I’ve done all I could about that. I went straight to Mr. Brandreth and tried to get him to take it. But I couldn’t. What shall I tell your father, if he asks me?”
“You must tell him the truth,” said the girl, sadly.
“Is that Mr. Ray?” Mrs. Denton called from the sick-room. “Come in, Mr. Ray. Father wants you.”
“In a moment. Come here, Mrs. Denton,” Ray called back.
She came out, and he told her what he had told Peace. She did not seem to see its bearing at once. When she realized it all, and had spent her quick wrath in denunciation of Mr. Brandreth’s heartlessness, she said desperately: “Well, you must come now. Perhaps it isn’t his book; perhaps it’s something else. But he wants you.”
She had to rouse her father from the kind of torpor in which he lay like one dead. She made him understand who was there, and then he smiled, and turned his eyes appealingly toward Ray. “Put your ear as close to his lips as you can. He can’t write any more. He wants to say something to you.”
Ray stooped over and put his ear to the drawn lips. A few whiffs of inarticulate breath mocked the dying man’s endeavor to speak. “I’m sorry; I can’t catch a syllable,” said Ray.
A mute despair showed itself in the old man’s eyes.
“Look at me father!” cried Mrs. Denton. “Is it about your book?”
The faintest smile came over his face.
“Did you wish to ask Mr. Ray if he would speak to Mr. Brandreth about it?”
The smile dimly dawned again.
“Well, he has spoken to him. He went to see him last night, and he’s come to tell you”—Ray shuddered and held his breath—“to tell you that Mr. Brandreth will take your book, and he’s going to publish it right away!”
A beatific joy lit up Hughes’s face; and Ray drew a long breath.
Peace looked at her sister.
“I don’t care!” said Mrs. Denton, passionately, dropping her voice. “You have your light, and I have mine.”
Rayfollowed Hughes to his grave in the place where Denton and his children were already laid. It did not seem as if the old man were more related to them in death than he had been in life by their propinquity; but it satisfied a belated maternal and conjugal sentiment in Mrs. Denton. She did not relinquish the leading place in the family affairs which she had taken in her father’s last days. She decided against staying in their present apartment after their month was out, and found a tiny flat of three rooms in a better neighborhood down-town, where she had their scanty possessions established, including the cat.
Kane did not go to the funeral because of a prejudice which he said he had against such events; David Hughes, he said, would have been the first to applaud his sincerity in staying away. But he divined that there might be need of help of another kind in the emergency, and he gave it generously and delicately. He would not suffer Mr. Brandreth to render any part of this relief; he insisted that it was his exclusive privilege as Hughes’s old friend. Now that David was gone, he professed a singularly vivid sense of his presence; and he owned that he had something likethe pleasure of carrying a point against him in defraying his funeral expenses.
Hughes’s daughters accepted his help frankly, each after her kind: Mrs. Denton as a gift which it must long continue to be; Peace as a loan which must some day be repaid. The girl went back to her work in due time, and whenever Ray visited his publisher he saw her at her desk.
He did not always go to speak to her, for he had a shamefaced fear that she was more or less always engaged in working up hints from Mr. Brandreth into paragraphs about aA Modern Romeo. His consciousness exaggerated the publisher’s activity in this sort; and at first he shunned all these specious evidences of public interest in the forthcoming novel. Then he began jealously to look for them, and in his mind he arraigned the journals where they did not appear for envy and personal spite. It would have been difficult for him to prove why there should have been either in his case, unless it was because their literary notes were controlled by people whose books had been ignored or censured byEvery Evening, and this theory could not hold with all. Most of the papers, however, published the paragraphs, with that munificence which journalism shows towards literature. The author found the inspired announcements everywhere; sometimes they were varied by the office touch, but generally they were printed exactly as Mr. Brandreth framed them; however he found them, they gave Ray an insensate joy. Even the paragraphs in the trade journals, purelyperfunctory as they were, had a flavor of sincere appreciation; the very advertisements which accompanied them there affected him like favorable expressions of opinion. His hunger for them was inappeasable; in his heart he accused Mr. Brandreth of a stinted proclamation.
The publisher was hurrying the book forward for the summer trade, and was aiming it especially at the reader going into the country, or already there. He had an idea that the summer resorts had never been fully worked in behalf of the better sort of light literature, and he intended to make any sacrifice to get the book pushed by the news companies. He offered them rates ruinously special, and he persuaded Ray to take five per cent. on such sales if they could be made. He pressed forward the printing, and the author got his proofs in huge batches, with a demand for their prompt return. The nice revision which he had fancied himself giving the work in type was impossible; it went from his hand with crudities that glared in his tormented sense, till a new instalment eclipsed the last. He balanced the merits and defects against one another, and tried to believe that the merits would distract the attention of criticism from the defects. He always knew that the story was very weak in places; he conceived how it could be attacked in these; he attacked it himself with pitiless ridicule in a helpless impersonation of different reviewers; and he gasped in his self-inflicted anguish. When the last proof left his hands the feeblest links were the strength of the wholechain, which fell to pieces from his grasp like a rope of sand.
There was some question at different times whether the book had not better be published under a pseudonym, and Ray faithfully submitted it to the editor ofEvery Evening, as something he was concerned in. It was to be considered whether it was advisable for a critic to appear as an author, and whether the possible failure of the book would not react unfavorably upon the criticisms of the journal. The chief decided that it would make no difference to him, and at the worst it could do no more than range Ray with the other critics who had failed as authors. With the publisher it was a more serious matter, and he debated much whether the book, as a stroke of business, had not better go to the public anonymously. They agreed that P. B. S. Ray on the title-page would be rather formidable from the number of the initials which the reader would have to master in speaking of the author. Shelley Ray, on the other hand, would be taken for a sentimental pseudonym. They decided that anonymity was the only thing for it.
“But then, it will be losing the interest of your money, if the book goes,” Mr. Brandreth mused. “You have a right to the cumulative reputation from it, so that if you should write another”—
“Oh, don’t be afraid of there ever being another!” said Ray, with his distracted head between his hands. He suddenly lifted it. “What is the matter with the Spartan severity of S. Ray?”
“S. Ray might do,” Mr. Brandreth assented, thoughtfully. “Should you mind my asking Mrs. Brandreth how it strikes her?”
“Not at all. Very glad to have you. It’s short, and unpretentious, and non-committal. I think it might do.”
Mrs. Brandreth thought so too, and in that form the author’s name appeared on the title-page. Even in that form it did not escape question and censure. One reviewer devoted his criticism of the story to inquiry into the meaning of the author’s initial; another surmised it a mask. But, upon the whole, its simplicity piqued curiosity, and probably promoted the fortune of the book, as far as that went.
There was no immediate clamor over it. In fact, it was received so passively by the public and the press that the author might well have doubted whether there was any sort of expectation of it, in spite of the publisher’s careful preparation of the critic’s or the reader’s mind. There came back at once from obscure quarters a few echoes, more or less imperfect, of the synopsis of the book’s attractions sent out with the editorial copies, but the influential journals remained heart-sickeningly silent concerningA Modern Romeo. There was a boisterous and fatuous eulogy of the book in the MidlandEcho, which Ray knew for the expression of Sanderson’s friendship; but eager as he was for recognition, he could not let this count; and it was followed by some brief depreciatory paragraphs in which he perceived the willingness of Hanks Brothersto compensate themselves for having so handsomely let Sanderson have his swing. He got some letters of acknowledgment from people whom he had sent the book; he read them with hungry zest, but he could not make himself believe that they constituted impartial opinion; not even the letter of the young lady who had detected him in the panoply of his hero, and who now wrote to congratulate him on a success which she too readily took for granted. One of his sisters replied on behalf of his father and mother, and said they had all been sitting up reading the story aloud together, and that their father liked it as much as any of them; now they were anxious to see what the papers would say; had he read the long review in theEcho, and did not he think it rather cool and grudging for a paper that he had been connected with? He hardly knew whether this outburst of family pride gave him more or less pain than an anonymous letter which he got from his native village, and which betrayed the touch of the local apothecary; his correspondent, who also dealt in books, and was a man of literary opinions, heaped the novel with ridicule and abuse, and promised the author a coat of tar and feathers on the part of his betters whom he had caricatured, if ever he should return to the place. Ray ventured to offer a copy to the lady who had made herself his social sponsor in New York, and he hoped for some intelligent praise from her. She asked him where in the world he had got together such a lot of queer people, like nothing on earth but those one used to meet in the old days when one tookcountry board; she mocked at the sufferings of his hero, and said what a vulgar little piece his heroine was; but she supposed he meant them to be what they were, and she complimented him on his success in handling them. She confessed, though, that she never read American novels, or indeed any but French ones, and that she did not know exactly where to rank his work; she burlesqued a profound impression of the honor she ought to feel in knowing a distinguished novelist. “You’ll be putting us all into your next book, I suppose. Mind you give me golden hair, not yet streaked with silver.”
In the absence of any other tokens of public acceptance, Ray kept an eager eye out for such signs of it as might be detected in the booksellers’ windows and on their sign-boards. The placards of other novels flamed from their door-jambs, but they seemed to know nothing ofA Modern Romeo. He sought his book in vain among those which formed the attractions of their casements; he found it with difficulty on their counters, two or three rows back, and in remote corners. It was like a conspiracy to keep it out of sight; it was not to be seen on the news-stands of the great hotels or the elevated stations, and Ray visited the principal railway depots without detecting a copy.
He blamed Mr. Brandreth for a lack of business energy in all this; he would like to see him fulfil some of those boasts of push which, when he first heard them, made him creep with shame. Mr. Brandrethhad once proposed a file of sandwich men appealing with successive bill-boards:
I.Have you ReadII.“A Modern Romeo?”III.Every One is ReadingIV.“A Modern Romeo.”V.Why?VI.BecauseVII.“A Modern Romeo” isVIII.The Great American Novel.
Ray had absolutely forbidden this procession, but now he would have taken off his hat to it, and stood uncovered, if he could have met it in Union Square or in Twenty-third Street.
Inthis time of suspense Ray kept away from old Kane, whose peculiar touch he could not bear. But he knew perfectly well what his own feelings were, and he did not care to have them analyzed. He could not help sending Kane the book, and for a while he dreaded his acknowledgments; then he resented his failure to make any.
In the frequent visits he paid to his publisher, he fancied that his welcome from Mr. Brandreth was growing cooler, and he did not go so often. He kept doggedly at his work in theEvery Eveningoffice; but here the absolute silence of his chief concerning his book was as hard to bear as Mr. Brandreth’s fancied coolness; he could not make out whether it meant compassion or dissatisfaction, or how it was to effect his relation to the paper. The worst of it was that his adversity, or his delayed prosperity, which ever it was, began to corrupt him. In his self-pity he wrote so leniently of some rather worthless books that he had no defence to make when his chief called his attention to the wide divergence between his opinions and those of some other critics. At times when he resented the hardship of his fate he scored the books before him with a severity that was as unjust as the weak commiseration in his praises. He felt sure that if thesituation prolonged itself his failure as an author must involve his failure as a critic.
It was not only the coolness in Mr. Brandreth’s welcome which kept him aloof; he had a sense of responsibility, which was almost a sense of guilt, in the publisher’s presence, for he was the author of a book which had been published contrary to the counsel of all his literary advisers. It was true that he had not finally asked Mr. Brandreth to publish it, but he had been eagerly ready to have him do it; he had kept his absurd faith in it, and his steadfastness must have imparted a favorable conviction to Mr. Brandreth; he knew that there had certainly been ever so much personal kindness for him mixed up with its acceptance. The publisher, however civil outwardly—and Mr. Brandreth, with all his foibles, was never less than a gentleman—must inwardly blame him for his unlucky venture. The thought of this became intolerable, and at the end of a Saturday morning, when the book was three or four weeks old, he dropped in at Chapley’s to have it out with Mr. Brandreth. The work on the Saturday edition of the paper was always very heavy, and Ray’s nerves were fretted from the anxieties of getting it together, as well as from the intense labor of writing. He was going to humble himself to the publisher, and declare their failure to be all his own fault; but he had in reserve the potentiality of a bitter quarrel with him if he did not take it in the right way.
He pushed on to Mr. Brandreth’s room, tense with his purpose, and stood scowling and silent when hefound Kane there with him. Perhaps the old fellow divined the danger in Ray’s mood; perhaps he pitied him; perhaps he was really interested in the thing which he was talking of with the publisher, and which he referred to Ray without any preliminary ironies.
“It’s about the career of a book; how it begins to go, and why, and when.”
“Apropos ofA Modern Romeo?” Ray asked, harshly.
“If you please,A Modern Romeo.” Ray took the chair which Mr. Brandreth signed a clerk to bring him from without. Kane went on: “It’s very curious, the history of these things, and I’ve looked into it somewhat. Ordinarily a book makes its fortune, or it doesn’t, at once. I should say this was always the case with a story that had already been published serially; but with a book that first appears as a book, the chances seem to be rather more capricious. The first great success with us wasUncle Tom’s Cabin, and that was assured before the story was finished in the oldNational Era, where it was printed. But that had an immense motive power behind it—a vital question that affected the whole nation.”
“I seem to have come too late for the vital questions,” said Ray.
“Oh no! oh no! There are always plenty of them left. There is the industrial slavery, which exists on a much more universal scale than the chattel slavery; that is still waiting its novelist.”
“Or its Trust of novelists,” Ray scornfully suggested.
“Very good; very excellent good; nothing less than a syndicate perhaps could grapple with a theme of such vast dimensions.”
“It would antagonize a large part of the reading public,” Mr. Brandreth said; but he had the air of making a mental memorandum to keep an eye out for MSS. dealing with industrial slavery.
“So much the better! So much the better!” said Kane. “Robert Elsmereantagonized much more than half its readers by its religious positions. But that wasn’t what I was trying to get at. I was thinking about how some of the phenomenally successful books hung fire at first.”
“Ah, that interests me as the author of a phenomenally successful book that is still hanging fire,” sighed Ray.
Kane smiled approval of his attempt to play with his pain, and went on: “You know thatGates Ajar, which sold up into the hundred thousands, was three months selling the first fifteen hundred.”
“Is that so?” Ray asked. “A Modern Romeohas been three weeks selling the first fifteen.” He laughed, and Mr. Brandreth with him; but the fact encouraged him, and he could see that it encouraged the publisher.
“We won’t speak ofMr. Barnes of New York”—
“Oh no! Don’t!” cried Ray.
“You might be very glad to have written it on some accounts, my dear boy,” said Kane.
“Have you read it?”
“That’s neither here nor there. I haven’t seenLittle Lord Fauntleroy. But I wanted to speak ofLooking Backward. Four months after that was published, the first modest edition was still unsold.”
Kane rose. “I just dropped in to impart these facts to your publisher, in case you and he might be getting a little impatient of the triumph which seems to be rather behind time. I suppose you’ve noticed it? These little disappointments are not suffered in a corner.”
“Then your inference is that at the end of three or four monthsA Modern Romeowill be selling at the rate of five hundred a day? I’m glad for Brandreth here, but I shall be dead by that time.”
“Oh no! Oh no!” Kane softly entreated, while he took Ray’s hand between his two hands. “One doesn’t really die of disappointed literature any more than one dies of disappointed love. That is one of the pathetic superstitions which we like to cherish in a world where we get well of nearly all our hurts, and live on to a hale old imbecility. Depend upon it, my dear boy, you will survive your book at least fifty years.” Kane wrung Ray’s hand, and got himself quickly away.
“There is a good deal of truth in what he says”—Mr. Brandreth began cheerfully.
“About my outliving my book?” Ray asked. “Thank you. There’s all the truth in the world in it.”
“I don’t mean that, of course. I mean the chancesthat it will pick up any time within three months, and make its fortune.”
“You’re counting on a lucky accident.”
“Yes, I am. I’ve done everything I can to push the book, and now we must trust to luck. You have to trust to luck in the book business, in every business. Business is buying on the chance of selling at a profit. The political economists talk about the laws of business; but there are no laws of business. There is nothing but chances, and no amount of wisdom can forecast them or control them. You had better be prudent, but if you are always prudent you will die poor. ‘Be bold; be bold; be not too bold.’ That’s about all there is of it. And I’m going to be cheerful too. I’m still betting onA Modern Romeo.” The young publisher leaned forward and put his hand on Ray’s shoulder, in a kindly way, and shook him a little. “Come! What will you bet that it doesn’t begin to go within the next fortnight? I don’t ask you to put up any money. Will you risk the copyright on the first thousand?”
“No, I won’t bet,” said Ray, more spiritlessly than he felt, for the proposition to relinquish a part of his copyright realized it to him. Still he found it safest not to allow himself any revival of his hopes; if he did it would be tempting fate to dash them again. In that way he had often got the better of fate; there was no other way to do it, at least for him.
Aftera silent and solitary dinner, Ray went to see Mrs. Denton and Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine, and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters. They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family, and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.
That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back in a moment.”
He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between himself andPeace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst; and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.
He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back. I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another spring. Why didn’t I do it?”
“Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work there,” she suggested.
“Oh, my work! That is what people are alwayssacrificing the good of life to—their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another unsuccessful novel.”
“Is your novel a failure?” she asked.
“Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail in a bad cause—that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if possible, flatter him.
“I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.
“Oh, have you?” he palpitated.
“And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way”—
“Yes?”
“And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine’s character beautifully. Mr. Simpsonwondered whether you really believe in hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it.”
Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous, and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted, common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray could not make this choice. He said dreamily: “If Mr. Brandreth could only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it.”
Peace laughed a little. “Oh, they disliked the wicked people. They thought the hard old father ofthe heroine was terrible, and was justly punished by his daughter’s death. At the same time they thought you ought to have had her revive in time to seize the hero’s hand, when he is going to shoot himself, and keep him from giving himself a mortal wound. The cousin ought to get well, too; or else confess before he dies that he intended to throw the hero over the cliff, so that it could be made out a case of self-defence. Mr. Simpson says that could be done to the satisfaction of any jury.”
Ray laughed too. “Yes. It would have been more popular if it had ended well.”
“Perhaps not,” Peace suggested. “Isn’t it the great thing to make people talk about a book? If it ended well they wouldn’t have half so much to say as they will now about it.”
“Perhaps,” Ray assented with meek hopefulness. “But, Peace, what doyousay about it? You’ve never told me that yet. Do you really despise it so much?”
“I’ve never said that I despised it.”
“You’ve never said you didn’t, and by everything that you’ve done, you’ve left me to think that you do. I know,” said the young man, “that I’m bringing up associations and recollections that must be painful to you; they’re painful and humiliating to me. But it seems to me that you owe me that much.”
“I owe you much more than that,” said the girl. “Do you think that I forget—can forget—anything—all that you’ve been to us?”
“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Ray. “I didn’t mean that. And you needn’t tell me now what you think of my book. But sometime you will, won’t you?” He drew forward a little nearer to her, where they sat in the light which had begun to wane. “Until then—until then—I want you to let me be the best friend you have in the world—the best friend I can be to any one.”
He stopped for some answer from her, and she said: “No one could be a truer friend to us than you have been, from the very first. And we have mixed you up so in our trouble!”
“Oh, no! But if it’s given me any sort of right to keep on coming to see Mrs. Denton and you, just as I used?”
“Why not?” she returned.
Raywent home ill at ease with himself. He spent a bad night, and he seemed to have sunk away only a moment from his troubles, when a knock at his door brought him up again into the midst of them. He realized them before he realized the knock sufficiently to call out, “Who’s there?”
“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice without; “you’re not up yet! Can I come in?”
“Certainly,” said Ray, and he leaned forward and slid back the bolt of his door: it was one advantage of a room so small that he could do this without getting out of bed.
Mr. Brandreth seemed to beam with one radiance from his silk hat, his collar, his boots, his scarf, his shining eyes and smooth-shaven friendly face, as he entered.
“Of course,” he said, “you haven’t seen theMetropolisyet?”
“No; what is the matter with theMetropolis?”
Mr. Brandreth, with his perfectly fitted gloves on, and his natty cane dangling from his wrist, unfolded the supplement of the newspaper, and accurately folded it again to the lines of the first three columnsof the page. Then he handed it to Ray, and delicately turned away and looked out of the window.
Ray glanced at the space defined, and saw that it was occupied by a review ofA Modern Romeo. There were lengths of large open type for the reviewer’s introduction and comments and conclusion, and embedded among these, in closer and finer print, extracts from the novel, where Ray saw his own language transfigured and glorified.
The critic struck in the beginning a note which he sounded throughout; a cry of relief, of exultation, at what was apparently the beginning of a new order of things in fiction. He hailed the unknown writer ofA Modern Romeoas the champion of the imaginative and the ideal against the photographic and the commonplace, and he expressed a pious joy in the novel as a bold advance in the path that was to lead forever away from the slough of realism. But he put on a philosophic air in making the reader observe that it was not absolutely a new departure, a break, a schism; it was a natural and scientific evolution, it was a development of the spiritual from the material; the essential part of realism was there, but freed from the grossness, the dulness of realism as we had hitherto known it, and imbued with a fresh life. He called attention to the firmness and fineness with which the situation was portrayed and the characters studied before the imagination began to deal with them; and then he asked the reader to notice how, when this foundation had once been laid, it was made to serve as a “star-ypointing pyramid” from which the author’s fancy took its bold flight through realms untravelled by the photographic and the commonplace. He praised the style of the book, which he said corresponded to the dual nature of the conception, and recalled Thackeray in the treatment of persons and things, and Hawthorne in the handling of motives and ideas. There was, in fact, so much subtlety in the author’s dealing with these, that one might almost suspect a feminine touch, but for the free and virile strength shown in the passages of passion and action.
The reviewer quoted several of such passages, and Ray followed with a novel intensity of interest the words he already knew by heart. The whole episode of throwing the cousin over the cliff was reprinted; but the parts which the reviewer gave the largest room and the loudest praise were those embodying the incidents of the hypnotic trance and the tragical close of the story. Here, he said, was a piece of the most palpitant actuality, and he applauded it as an instance of how the imagination might deal with actuality. Nothing in the whole range of commonplace, photographic, realistic fiction was of such striking effect as this employment of a scientific discovery in the region of the ideal. He contended that whatever lingering doubt people might have of the usefulness of hypnotism as a remedial agent, there could be no question of the splendid success with which the writer of this remarkable novel had turned it to account in poetic fiction of a very high grade. He did not say the highest grade;the book had many obvious faults. It was evidently the first book of a young writer, whose experience of life had apparently been limited to a narrow and comparatively obscure field. It was in a certain sense provincial, even parochial; but perhaps the very want of an extended horizon had concentrated the author’s thoughts the more penetratingly on the life immediately at hand. What was important was that he had seen this life with the vision of an idealist, and had discerned its poetic uses with the sense of the born artist, and had set it in
“The light that never was on sea or land.”
“The light that never was on sea or land.”
“The light that never was on sea or land.”
Much more followed to like effect, and the reviewer closed with a promise to look with interest for the future performance of a writer who had already given much more than the promise of mastery; who had given proofs of it. His novel might not be the great American novel which we had so long been expecting, but it was a most notable achievement in the right direction. The author was the prophet of better things; he was a Moses, who, if we followed him, would lead us up from the flesh-pots of Realism toward the promised land of the Ideal.
From time to time Ray made a little apologetic show of not meaning to do more than glance the review over, but Mr. Brandreth insisted upon his taking his time and reading it all; he wanted to talk to him about it. He began to talk before Ray finished; in fact he agonized him with question and comment, all through;and when Ray laid the paper down at last, he came and sat on the edge of his bed.
“Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t believe in working on Sunday, and that sort of thing; but I believe this is providential. My wife does, too; she says it’s a reward for the faith we’ve had in the book; and that it would be a sin to lose a moment’s time. If there is to be any catch-on at all, it must be instantaneous; we mustn’t let the effect of this review get cold, and I’m going to strike while it’s red-hot.” The word seem to suggest the magnitude of the purpose which Mr. Brandreth expressed with seriousness that befitted the day. “I’m simply going to paint the universe red. You’ll see.”
“Well, well,” said Ray, “you’d better not tell me how. I guess I’ve got as much as I can stand, now.”
“If that book doesn’t succeed,” said Mr. Brandreth, as solemnly as if registering a vow, “it won’t be my fault.”
He went away, and Ray passed into a trance such as wraps a fortunate lover from the outer world. But nothing was further from his thoughts than love. The passion that possessed him was egotism flattered to an intensity in which he had no life but in the sense of himself. No experience could be more unwholesome while it lasted, but a condition so intense could not endure. His first impulse was to keep away from every one who could keep him from the voluptuous sense of his own success. He knew very well that the review in theMetropolisoverrated his book, but heliked it to be overrated; he wilfully renewed his delirium from it by reading it again and again, over his breakfast, on the train to the Park, and in the lonely places which he sought out there apart from all who could know him or distract him from himself. At first it seemed impossible; at last it became unintelligible. He threw the paper into some bushes; then after he had got a long way off, he went back and recovered it, and read the review once more. The sense had returned, the praises had relumed their fires; again he bathed his spirit in their splendor. It was he, he, he, of whom those things were said. He tried to realize it. Who was he? The question scared him; perhaps he was going out of his mind. At any rate he must get away from himself now; that was his only safety. He thought whom he should turn to for refuge. There were still people of his society acquaintance in town, and he could have had a cup of tea poured for him by a charming girl at any one of a dozen friendly houses. There were young men, more than enough of them, who would have welcomed him to their bachelor quarters. There was old Kane. But they would have all begun to talk to him about that review; Peace herself would have done so. He ended by going home, and setting to work on some notices for the next day’sEvery Evening. The performance was a play of double consciousness in which he struggled with himself as if with some alien personality. But the next day he could take the time to pay Mr. Brandreth a visit without wronging the work he had carried so far.
On the way he bought the leading morning papers, and saw that the publisher had reprinted long extracts from theMetropolisreview as advertisements in the type of the editorial page; in theMetropolisitself he reprinted the whole review. “This sort of thing will be in the principal Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis papers just as soon as the mail can carry them my copy. Ihadthought of telegraphing the advertisement, but it will cost money enough as it is,” said Mr. Brandreth.
“Are you sure you’re not throwing your money away?” Ray asked, somewhat aghast.
“I’m sure I’m not throwing my chance away,” the publisher retorted with gay courage. He developed the plan of campaign as he had conceived it, and Ray listened with a kind of nerveless avidity. He looked over at Mr. Chapley’s room, where he knew that Peace was busily writing, and he hoped that she did not know that he was there. His last talk with her had mixed itself up with the intense experience that had followed, and seemed of one frantic quality with it. He walked out to the street door with Mr. Brandreth beside him, and did not turn for a glimpse of her.
“Oh by-the-way,” said the publisher at parting, “if you’d been here a little sooner, I could have made you acquainted with your reviewer. He dropped in a little while ago to ask who S. Ray was, and I did my best to make him believe it was a real name. I don’t think he was more than half convinced.”
“I don’t more than half believe in him,” said Ray, lightly, to cover his disappointment. “Who is he?”
“Well, their regular man is off on sick leave, and this young fellow—Worrell is his name—is a sort of under study. He was telling me how he happened to go in for your book—those things are always interesting. He meant to take another book up to his house with him, and he found he had yours when he got home, and some things about hypnotism. He went through them, and then he thought he would just glance at yours, anyway, and he opened on the hypnotic trance scene, just when his mind was full of the subject, and he couldn’t let go. He went back to the beginning and read it all through, and then he gave you the benefit of the other fellow’s chance. He wanted to see you, when I told him about you. Curious how these things fall out, half the time?”
“Very,” said Ray, rather blankly.
“I knew you’d enjoy it.”
“Oh, I do.”
Whetherthe boom forA Modern Romeowhich began with the appearance of theMetropolisreview was an effect of that review or not, no one acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say. There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in theMetropoliswhich had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book was due wholly to its merit.
“And what was its long failure due to?” Ray asked, tasting the bitter of the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.
“To its demerit.”
Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review; afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which, in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize. What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers’ windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow itwas in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say; he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross, palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while he remained seated. It was specially confided to lady readers that his slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as smooth and pure as a girl’s. The processed reproduction of Ray’s photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes,it brought him a letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in their studies of him; at theEvery Eveningoffice, where their visits subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray’s celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews, he took occasion to say: “I like your work and I want to keep you. As it is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I prefer to anticipate, and you’ll find it put up in your next check to the figure which I think the paper ought to stand.” He did not otherwise recognize the fact of the book’s success, or speak of it; as compared with his paper, Ray’s book was of no importance to him whatever.
The interviews were always flattering to Ray’s vanity, in a certain way, but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it and read it. In some cases they came to himwith poetic preoccupations from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much stranger than fiction.
“Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book,” one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly upon the author’s, “it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in the whole history of literature.Won’tyou tellmethe truth about it, Mr. Ray?”
“Why, I don’t know the truth about it myself,” Ray said.
“Oh, how delightful!” cried the young lady. “I’m going to putthatin, at any rate;” and she continued to work the young author with her appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of telling.
He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six months among the trade?”
Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of recollection, “Oh!Thatgirl! Well, she was determined to havesomethingexclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you thatwhen I chanced it on this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”
“Thatisinteresting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to pose as your preserver.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested. “And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife, and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that girl what she repeated to you.”
“Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even tragical.”
“Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made it right with Mr. Hughes.”
“Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right withhim,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken his book and would bring it out at once.”
Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that. But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended, cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know thatA Modern Romeohas come of age; we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”
“Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to fifty thousand by this time.
The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it did not. Had it, by some process ofnatural selection, reached exactly those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make, and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue? He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr. Brandreth.
Finally, Kane said: “Why do we always seek a law for things? Is there a law for ourselves? We think so, but it’s out of sight for the most part, and generally we act from mere caprice, from impulse. I’ve lived a good many years, but I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve seen the cause overtaken by the consequence more than two or three times; then it struck me as rather theatrical. Consequences I’ve seen a plenty, but not causes. Perhaps this is merely a sphere of ultimations. We used to flatter ourselves, in the simple old days, when we thought we were all miserable sinners, that we were preparing tremendous effects, to follow elsewhere, by what we said and did here. But what if the things that happen here are effects initiated elsewhere?”
“It’s a very pretty conjecture,” said Ray, “but it doesn’t seem to have a very direct bearing on the falling off in the sale ofA Modern Romeo.”
“Everything in the universe is related to that book, if you could only see it properly. If it has stopped selling, it is probably because the influence of some favorable star, extinguished thousands of years ago, has just ceased to reach this planet.”
Kane had the air of making a mental note after he said this, and Ray began to laugh. “There ought to be money in that,” he said.
“No, there is no money in Hard Sayings,” Kane returned, sadly; “there is only—wisdom.”
Ray was by no means discouraged with his failures to divine the reason for the arrested sale of his book. At heart he was richly satisfied with its success, and he left the public without grudging, to their belief that it had sold a hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Brandreth was satisfied, too. He believed that the sale would pick up again in the fall after people got back from the country; he had discovered that the book had enduring qualities; but now the question was, what was Ray going to write next? “You ought to strike while the iron’s hot, you know.”
“Of course, I’ve been thinking about that,” the young fellow admitted, “and I believe I’ve got a pretty good scheme for a novel.”
“Could you give me some notion of it?”
“No, I couldn’t. It hasn’t quite crystallized in my mind yet. And I don’t believe it will, somehow, till I get a name for it.”
“Have you thought of a name?”
“Yes—half-a-dozen that won’t do.”
“There’s everything in a name,” said the publisher. “I believe it made theModern Romeo’sfortune.”
Ray mused a moment. “How wouldA Rose by any other Namedo?”
“That’s rather attractive,” said Mr. Brandreth.“Well, anyway, remember that we are to have the book.”
Ray hesitated. “Well—not on those old ten-percent. terms, Brandreth.”
“Oh, I think we can arrange the terms all right,” said Mr. Brandreth.
“Because I can do much better, you know.”
“Oh, they’ve been after you, have they?”
The young fellow held up the fingers of one hand.
“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “your next book belongs to Chapley & Co. You want to keep your books together. One will help sell the other.A Rose by any other Namewill wake upA Modern Romeowhen it comes out.”