He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains hurtling by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.
He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the avenue and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park. Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space, in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down upon the havoc thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet pleasance.
“Amiable prospect, isn’t it?” said Kane. “It looks as if Hughes’s Afreet has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn’t to judge of it at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!” He passed his hand through Ray’s lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on the scenery. “Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear old friend?”
“Of Mr. Hughes?” Ray asked; and he restrained himself in a pretended question.
“Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes’s friends.” Ray flashed out upon this. “I think his friends are a lot of cranks.”
“Yes; very good; very excellent good! They are a lot of cranks. Are they the first you have met in New York?”
“No; the place seems to be full of them.”
“Beginning with the elderly gentleman whom you met the first morning?”
“Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman.”
Kane smiled with appreciation. “Well, we won’t be harsh on those two. We won’t call them cranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired dreamers, if you like. As I understand it, we are all dreamers. If we like a man’s dream, we call him a prophet; if we don’t like his dream, we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes inside of six months?”
The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. “What is the matter with the world?” he burst out. “I don’t see that the world is so very sick. Why isn’t it going on very well? I don’t understand what this talk is all about. I don’t see what those people have got to complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his work is worth, and let the best man win. What’s the trouble? Where’s the wrong?”
“Ah,” said Kane, “what a pity you didn’t set forth those ideas when Hughes called upon you!”
“And have all that crew jump on me? Thank you!” said Ray.
“You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew,” said Kane. “I don’t know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn’t help feeling to-day how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David’s were very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don’t like being spoken to in meeting?”
“No, I don’t,” said Ray, bluntly.
“I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don’t think poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly feels that he’s got to hurry, if he’s going to have the kingdom of heaven on earth in his time; and he wants every one to lend a hand.”
For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked stiffly: “Couldn’t he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn’t be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?”
“No, I don’t know that he could,” said Kane, with a pensive singleness rare in him. “Any help of that kind would mean dependence, and David Hughes is proud.”
They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the viaduct carrying the northern railways; one of its noble arches opened before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent was like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stable-yard; a shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped behind its dusty, leafless vines.
“He might be got into that,” said Kane, whimsically, “at no increase of rent, and at much increase of comfort and quiet — at least till the Afreet began to get in his work.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather too much like that eremitism which he’s so down on?” asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.
“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would,” Kane consented, as they struck across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks; the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.
“I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitage somewhere — a co-operative hermitage, I suppose,” Ray went on. He did not feel bound to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone.
“Ah, yes,” said Kane. “What did you make of the son-in-law?”
“I don’t know. He’s a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke of his work.”
“Why, it’s rather a romantic story, I believe,” said Kane. “He was a young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he was going to find work; he’s a wood-engraver. I believe he’s always had the notion that the world was out of kilter, and it seems that he wasn’t very well himself when he looked in on the Family to see what they were doing to help it. He fell sick on their hands, and the Hugheses took care of him. Naturally, he married one of them when he got well enough, and naturally he married the wrong one.”
“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man” —
Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “His notion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.”
“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.
“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind — the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature — the Nature of
the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest” —
“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.”
“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of Hard Sayings.”
“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”
“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of A New Romeo. Is that what you call it?”
Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:
“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of truth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her she. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Bay’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”
“Oh, no” — Ray began.
“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane. “Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I couldn’t go. I forgot how repugnant the golden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away.”
He laughed, and Kay, more reluctantly, laughed with him.
“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I” —
He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.
“Perhaps that is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your welcome.”
Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t You must excuse me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But” —
“You don’t trust me!”
“Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t feel quite up to meeting people just now; I’ll push on down town. I’m rather tired. Good-by.”
Kane held his hand between both his palms. “I wonder what the real reason is! Is it grudge, or pride, or youth?”
“Neither,” said Ray. “It’s — clothes. My boots are muddy, and I’ve got on my second-best trousers.”
“Ah, now you are frank with me, and you give me a real reason. Perhaps you are right I dare say I should have thought so once.”
XVIII.
RAY did 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 without seeming 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 hap
pening 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 2 p. M. on Saturday till Monday 9 A. 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. “You are anxious! 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.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 519
