Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”

  Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery. “Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”

  “Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”

  “No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with an imperfect hold of her irony.

  “There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”

  “I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. I wish they would swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show him what his wealth was based on.”

  “It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality. The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not take the chance of suffering for himself and his family by relieving the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”

  “In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no chance of suffering.”

  “No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”

  He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript, father,” and brought it to him.

  The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.

  “Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.

  “Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if there was anything to go back to.”

  Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent, and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him. Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions. What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”

  “Then I don’t see why he objects to the new processes,” said Ray, with the heartlessness which so easily passes for wit Peace looked at him with grave surprise.

  Mrs. Denton laughed over the cat which had got up in her lap. “That’s what I tell him. But it doesn’t satisfy him.”

  “You know,” said the younger sister, with a reproach in her tone, which brought Ray sensibly under condemnation, too, “that he means that art must be free before it can be true, and that there can be no freedom where there is the fear of want.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Denton, turning her head for a new effect of the sleeping cat, “there was no fear of want in the Family; but there wasn’t much art, either.”

  Ray was tempted to laugh, but he wanted above all to read his poem, and to lead up to it without delay, and he denied himself the pleasure of a giggle with Mrs. Denton. “I suppose,” he said, “the experiment of emancipation is tried on too small a scale in a community.”

  “That is what father thinks,” said Peace. “That is why he wants the whole world to be free.”

  “Yes,” said Ray, aware of a relenting in her towards himself; and he added, with apparent inconsequence: “Perhaps it would help forward the time for it if every artist could express his feeling about it, or represent it somehow.”

  “I don’t see exactly how they could in a picture or a statue,” said Mrs. Denton.

  “No,” Ray assented from the blind alley where he had unexpectedly brought up. He broke desperately from it, and said, more toward Peace than toward her sister, “I have been trying to turn my own little disappointment into poetry. You know,” he added, “that Chapley & Co have declined my book?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, with a kind of shyness.

  “I wonder,” and here Ray took the manuscript out of his pocket, “whether you would let me read you some passages of my poem.”

  Mrs. Denton assented eagerly, and Peace less eagerly, but with an interest that was enough for him. Before he began to read, Mrs. Denton said a number of things that seemed suddenly to have accumulated in her mind, mostly irrelevant; she excused herself for leaving the room, and begged Ray to wait till she came back. Several times during the reading she escaped and returned; the poet finished in one of her absences.

  XXIV.

  “You see,” Ray said, “it’s merely a fragment” He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

  “Of course,” the girl answered, with a sigh “Isn’t disappointment always fragmentary?” she asked, sadly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Why, happiness is like something complete; and disappointment like something broken off, to me. A story that ends well seems rounded; and one that ends badly leaves you waiting, as you do just after some one dies.”

  “Is that why you didn’t like my story?” Ray asked, imprudently. He added quickly, at an embarrassment which came into her face, “Oh, I didn’t mean to add to my offence! I came here partly to excuse it. I was too persistent the other night.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Yes, I was. I had no right to an opinion from you. I knew it at the time, but I couldn’t help it You were right to refuse. But you can tell me how my poem strikes you. It isn’t offered for publication!”

  He hoped that she would praise some passages that he thought fine; but she began to speak of the motive, and he saw that she had not missed anything, that she had perfectly seized his intention. She talked to him of it as if it were the work of some one else, and he said impulsively, “If I had you to criticise my actions beforehand, I should not be so apt to make a fool of myself.”

  Mrs. Denton came back. “I ran off toward the last. I didn’t want to be here when Peace began to criticise. She’s so severe.”

  “She hasn’t been at all severe this time,” said Ray. “I don’t see how she could be,” Mrs. Denton returned. “All that I heard was splendid.”

  “It’s merely a fragment,” said Ray, with grave satisfaction in her flattery.

  “You must finish it, and read us the rest of it.”

  Ray looked at Peace, and something in her face made him say, “I shall never finish it; it isn’t worth it.”

  “Did Peace say that?”

  “No.”

  Mrs. Denton laughed. “That’s just like Peace. She makes other people say the disagreeable things she thinks about them.”

  “What a mysterious power!” said Ray. “Is it hypnotic suggestion?”

  He spoke lightly toward Peace, but her sister answered: “Oh,
we’re full of mysteries in this house. Did you know that my husband had a Voice?”

  “A voice! Is a voice mysterious?”

  “This one is. It’s an internal Voice. It tells him what to do.”

  “Oh, like the demon of Socrates.”

  “I hope it isn’t a demon!” said Mrs. Denton.

  “That depends upon what it tells him to do,” said Ray. In Socrates’ day a familiar spirit could be a demon without being at all bad. How proud you must be to have a thing like that in the family!”

  “I don’t know. It has its inconveniences, sometimes. When it tells him to do what we don’t want him to,” said Mrs. Denton.

  “Oh, but think of the compensations!” Ray urged. “Why, it’s equal to a ghost.”

  “I suppose it is a kind of ghost,” said Mrs. Denton, and Ray fancied she had the pride we all feel in any alliance, direct or indirect, with the supernatural. “Do you believe in dreams?” she asked abruptly.

  “Bad ones, I do,” said Ray. “We always expect bad dreams and dark presentiments to come true, don’t we!”

  “I don’t know. My husband does. He has a Dream as well as a Voice.”

  “Oh, indeed!” said Ray; and he added: “I see. The Voice is the one he talks with in his sleep.”

  The flippant suggestion amused Mrs. Denton; but a shadow of pain came over Peace’s face, that made Ray wish to get away from the mystery he had touched; she might be a believer in it, or ashamed of it.

  “I wonder,” he added, “why we never expect our day-dreams to come true?”

  “Perhaps because they’re never bad ones — because we know we’re just making them,” said Mrs. Denton.

  “It must he that! But, do we always make them? Sometimes my day-dreams seem to make themselves, and they keep on doing it so long that they tire me to death. They’re perfect daymares.”

  “How awful! The only way would he to go to sleep, if you wanted to get rid of them.”

  “Yes; and that isn’t so easy as waking up. Anybody can wake up; a man can wake up to go to execution; but it takes a very happy man to go to sleep.” The recognition of this fact reminded Ray that he was himself a very unhappy man; he had forgotten it for the time.

  “He might go into society and get rid of them that way,” Mrs. Denton suggested, with an obliquity which he was too simply masculine to perceive. “I suppose you go into society a good deal, Mr. Ray?”

  Peace made a little movement as of remonstrance, but she did not speak, and Ray answered willingly: “I go into society? I have been inside of just one house — or flat — besides this, since I came to New York.”

  “Why!” said Mrs. Denton.

  She seemed to be going to say something more, but she stopped at a look from her sister, and left Ray free to go on or not, as he chose. He told them it was Mr. Brandreth’s flat he had been in; at some little hints of curiosity from Mrs. Denton, he described it to her.

  “I have some letters from people in Midland, but I haven’t presented them yet,” he added at the end. “The Brandreths are all I know of society.”

  “They’re much more than we know. Well, it seems like fairyland,” said Mrs. Denton, in amiable self-derision. “I used to think that was the way we should live when we left the Family. I suppose there are people in New York that would think it was like fairyland to live like us, and not all in one room. Ansel is always preaching that when I grumble.”

  The cat sprang up into her lap, and she began to smooth its long flank, and turn her head from side to side, admiring its enjoyment.

  “Well,” Ray said, “whatever we do, we are pretty sure to be sorry we didn’t do something else.”

  He was going to lead up to his own disappointments by this commonplace, but Mrs. Denton interposed.

  “Oh, I’m not sorry we left the Family, if that’s what you mean. There’s some chance, here, and there everything went by rule; you had your share of the work, and you knew just what you had to expect every day. I used to say I wished something wrong would happen, just so as to have something happen. I believe it was more than half that that got father out, too,” she said, with a look at her sister.

  “I thought,” said Ray, “but perhaps I didn’t understand him, that your father wanted to make the world over on the image of your community.”

  “I guess he wanted to have the fun of chancing it, too,” said Mrs. Denton. “Of course he wants to make the world over, but he has a pretty good time as it is; and I’m glad of all I did and said to get him into it He had no chance to bring his ideas to bear on it in the Family.”

  “Then it was you who got him out of the community,” said Ray.

  “I did my best,” said Mrs. Denton. “But I can’t say I did it, altogether.”

  “Did you help?” he asked Peace.

  “I wished father to do what he thought was right He had been doubtful about the life there for a good while — whether it was really doing anything for humanity.”

  She used the word with no sense of cant in it; Ray could perceive that.

  “And do you ever wish you were back in the Family?”

  Mrs. Denton called out joyously: “Why, there is no Family to be back in, I’m thankful to say! Didn’t you know that?”

  “I forgot” Ray smiled, as he pursued, “Well, if there was one to be back in, would you like to be there, Miss Hughes?”

  “I can’t tell,” she answered, with a trouble in her voice. “When I’m not feeling very strong or well, I should. And when I see so many people struggling so hard here, and failing after all they do, I wish they could be where there was no failure, and no danger of it. In the Family we were safe, and we hadn’t any care.”

  “We hadn’t any choice, either,” said her sister. “What choice has a man who doesn’t know where the next day’s work is coming from?”

  Ray looked round to find that Denton had entered behind them from the room where he had been, and was sitting beside the window apparently listening to their talk. There was something uncanny in the fact of his unknown presence, though neither of the sisters seemed to feel it.

  “Oh, you’re there,” said Mrs. Denton, without turning from her cat “Well, I suppose that’s a question that must come home to you more and more. Did you ever hear of such a dreadful predicament as my husband’s in, Mr. Ray? He’s just hit on an invention that’s going to make us rich, and throw all the few remaining engravers out of work, when he gets it finished.” Her husband’s face clouded, but she went on: “His only hope is that the invention will turn out a failure. You don’t have any such complications in your work, do you, Mr. Ray?”

  “No,” said Ray, thinking what a good situation the predicament would be, in a story. “If they had taken my novel, and published an edition of fifty thousand, I don’t see how it could have reduced a single author to penury. But I don’t believe I could resist the advances of a publisher, even if I knew it might throw authors out of work right and left I could support their families till they got something to do.”

  “Yes, you might do that, Ansel,” his wife suggested, with a slanting smile at him. “I only hope we may have the opportunity. But probably it will be as hard to get a process accepted as a book.”

  “That hasn’t anything to do with the question,” Denton broke out. “The question is whether a man ought not to kill his creative thought as he would a snake, if he sees that there is any danger of its taking away work another man lives by. That is what I look at.”

  “And father,” said Mrs. Denton, whimsically, “is so high-principled that he won’t let us urge on the millenium by having pandemonium first. If we were allowed to do that, Ansel might quiet his conscience by reflecting that the more men he threw out of work, the sooner the good time would come. I don’t see why that isn’t a good plan, and it would work in so nicely with what we want to do. Just make everything so bad people cannot bear it, and then they will rise up in their might and make it better for themselves. Don’t you think so, Mr. Ray?”

  �
��Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

  All this kind of thinking and feeling, which was a part and parcel of these people’s daily life, was alien to his habit of mind. He grasped it feebly and reluctantly, without the power or the wish to follow it to conclusions, whether it was presented ironically by Mrs. Denton, or with a fanatical sincerity by her husband.

  “No, no! That won’t do,” Denton said. “I have tried to see that as a possible thoroughfare; but it isn’t possible. If we were dealing with statistics it would do; but it’s men we’re dealing with: men like ourselves that have women and children dependent on them.”

  “I am glad to hear you say that, Ansel,” Peace said, gently.

  “Yes,” he returned, bitterly, “whichever way I turn, the way is barred. My hands are tied, whatever I try to do. Some one must be responsible. Some one must atone. Who shall it be?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Denton, with a look of comic resignation, “it seems to be a pretty personal thing, after all, in spite of father’s philosophy. I always supposed that when we came into the world we should have an election, and vote down all these difficulties by an overwhelming majority.”

  Ray quoted, musingly:

  “The world is out of joint: — O cursed spite!

  That ever I was born to set it right!”

  “Yes? Who says that?”

  “Hamlet.”

  “Oh yes. Well, I feel just exactly as Ham does about it.”

  Denton laughed wildly out at her saucy drolling, and she said, as if his mirth somehow vexed her, “I should think if you’re so much troubled by that hard question of yours, you would get your Voice to say something.”

  Her husband rose, and stood looking down, while a knot gathered between his gloomy eyes. Then he turned and left the room without answering her.

  She sent a laugh after him. “Sometimes,” she said to the others, “the Voice doesn’t know any better than the rest of us.”

  Peace remained looking gravely at her a moment, and then she followed Denton out of the room.