Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “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 our Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of a social union for the workpeople; 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 Tolstoi a good 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 Tolstoian.”

  “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’ll try 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?”

  XIX.

  RAY’S heart 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 like having 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, he is a 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. “M
rs. 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, but of 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 eat 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 very healthy child.” 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 have met my 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 is not a 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 growing more 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 you will come some time?” and gratefully wrung his hand. “I saw how anxious you were about those opinions!”

  XX.

  WITH an 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 lightheaded 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 call The World Revisited.”

  Ray did not see exactly why Hughes should say his civilization, as if he had invented i
t; 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 for me! It’s for others! The public sees it ten times where I see it once. If I make it brutal and stupid, I am the tyrant, I am the oppressor — I, the individual! Besides, when the sovereign people is really lord of itself, it can and will do no man wrong.”