Mrs. Denton began to ask Ray about Mrs. Brandreth and Mrs. Chapley, pressing him with questions as to what kind of people they really were, and whether they were proud; she wondered why they had never come to call upon her. It would all have been a little vulgar if it had not been so childlike and simple. Ray was even touched by it when he thought that the chief concern of these ladies was to find out from him just what sort of crank her father was, and to measure his influence for evil on Mr. Chapley.
At the same time he heard Peace talking to Denton in a tone of entreaty and pacification. She staid so long that Ray had risen to go when she came back. He had hoped for a moment alone with her at parting, so that he might renew in better form the excuses that he pretended he had come to make. But the presence of her sister took all the seriousness and delicacy from them; he had to make a kind of joke of them; and he could not tell her at all of the mysterious message from Mr. Brandreth about the friend to whom he wished to submit his book, and of the final pang of disappointment which its immediate return had given him. He had meant that she should say something to comfort him for this, but he had to forego his intended consolation.
XXV.
RAY had no doubt that Kane was the court of final resort which the case against his novel had been appealed to, and he thought it hard that he should have refused to give it a last chance, or even to look at it again. Surely it was not so contemptible as that, so hopelessly bad that a man who seemed his friend could remember nothing in it that would make it valuable in a second reading. If the fault were not in the book, then it must be in the friend, and Ray renounced old Kane by every means he could command. He could not make it an open question; he could only treat him more and more coldly, and trust to Kane’s latent sense of guilt for the justification of his behavior. But Kane was either so hardened, or else regarded his own action as so venial, or perhaps believed it so right, that he did not find Ray’s coldness intelligible.
“My dear young friend,” he frankly asked, “is there anything between us but our disparity of years? That existed from the first moment of our acquaintance. I have consoled myself at times with the notion of our continuing together in an exemplary friendship, you growing older and wiser, and I younger and less wise, if possible, like two Swedenborgian spirits in the final state. But evidently something has happened to tinge our amity with a grudge in your mind. Do you object to saying just what property in me has imparted this unpleasant discoloration to it?”
Ray was ashamed to say, or rather unable. He answered that nothing was the matter, and that he did not know what Kane meant. He was obliged to prove this by a show of cordiality, which he began perhaps to feel when he reasoned away his first resentment. Kane had acted quite within his rights, and if there was to be any such thing as honest criticism, the free censure of a friend must be suffered and even desired. He said this to himself quite heroically; he tried hard to be ruled by a truth so obvious.
In other things his adversity demoralized him, for a time. He ceased to live in the future, as youth does and should do; he lived carelessly and wastefully in the present With nothing in prospect, it was no longer important how his time or money went; he did not try to save either. He never finished his poem, and he did not attempt anything else.
In the midst of his listlessness and disoccupation there came a letter from Hanks Brothers asking if he could not give a little more social gossip in his correspondence for the Echo; they reminded him that there was nothing people liked so much as personalities. Ray scornfully asked himself, How should he, who knew only the outsides of houses, supply social gossip, even if he had been willing? He made a sarcastic reply to Hanks Brothers, intimating his readiness to relinquish the correspondence if it were not to their taste; and they took him at his word, and wrote that they would hereafter make use of a syndicate letter.
It had needed this blow to rouse him from his reckless despair. If he were defeated now, it would be in the face of all the friends who had believed in him and expected success of him. His motive was not high; it was purely egoistic at the best; but he did not know this; he had a sense of virtue in sending his book off to a Boston publisher without undoing the inner wrappings in which the last New York publisher had returned it.
Then he went round to ask Mr. Brandreth if he knew of any literary or clerical or manual work he could get to do. The industrial fury which has subdued a continent, and brought it under the hard American hand, wrought in him, according to his quality, and he was not only willing but eager to sacrifice the scruples of delicacy he had in appealing to a man whom he had sought first on such different terms. His only question was how to get his business quickly, clearly, and fully before him Mr. Brandreth received him with a gayety that put this quite out of his mind; and he thought the publisher was going to tell him that he had decided, after all, to accept his novel.
“Ah, Mr. Ray,” Mr. Brandreth called out at sight of him, “I was just sending a note to you! Sit down a moment, won’t you? The editor of Every Evening was in here just now, and he happened to say he wished he knew some one who could make him a synopsis of a rather important book he’s had an advanced copy of from the other side. It’s likely to be of particular interest in connection with Coquelin’s visit; it’s a study of French comic acting from Molière down; and I happened to think of you. You know French?”
“Why, yes, thank you — to read. You’re very kind, Mr. Brandreth, to think of me.”
“Oh, not at all! I didn’t know whether you ever did the kind of thing the Every Evening wants, or whether you were not too busy; but I thought I’d drop an anchor to windward for you, on the chance that you might like to do it.”
“I should like very much to do it; and” —
“I’ll tell you why I did it,” Mr. Brandreth interrupted, radiantly. “I happened to know they’re making a change in the literary department of the Every Evening, and I thought that if this bit of work would let you show your hand — See?”
“Yes; and I’m everlastingly” —
“Not at all, not at all!” Mr. Brandreth opened the letter he was holding, and gave Ray a note that it inclosed. “That’s an introduction to the editor of the Every Evening, and you’ll strike him at the office about now, if you’d like to see him.”
Ray caught with rapture the hand Mr. Brandreth offered him. “I don’t know what to say to you, but I’m extremely obliged. I’ll go at once.” He started to the door, and turned. “I hope Mrs. Brandreth is well, and — and — the baby?”
“Splendidly. I shall want to have you up there again as soon as we can manage it. Why haven’t you been at Mrs. Chapley’s? Didn’t you get her card?”
“Yes; but I haven’t been very good company of late. I didn’t want to have it generally known.”
“I understand. Well, now you must cheer up. Good-by, and good luck to you!”
All the means of conveyance were too slow for Ray’s eagerness, and he walked. On his way down to that roaring and seething maelstrom of business, whose fierce currents swept all round the Every Evening office, he painted his future as critic of the journal with minute detail; he had died chief owner and had his statue erected to his memory in Park Square before he crossed that space and plunged into one of the streets beyond.
He was used to newspaper offices, and he was not surprised to find the editorial force of the Every Evening housed in a series of dens, opening one beyond the other till the last, with the chief in it, looked down on the street from which he climbed. He thought it all fit enough, for the present; but, while he still dwelt in the future, and before the office-boy had taken his letter from him to the chief, he swiftly flung up a building for the Every Evening as lofty and as ugly as any of the many-storied towers that rose about the frantic neighborhood. He blundered upon two other writers before he reached the chief; one of them looked up from his desk, and roared at him in unintelligible affliction; the other simply wagged his head, without lifting it, in the direction of the final room, where Ray found
himself sitting beside the editor-in-chief, without well knowing how he got there. The editor did not seem to know either, or to care that he was there, for some time; he kept on looking at this thing and that thing on the table before him; at everything but the letter Ray had sent in. When he did take that up he did not look at Ray; and while he talked with him he scarcely glanced at him; there were moments when he seemed to forget there was anybody there; and Ray’s blood began to burn with a sense of personal indignity. He wished to go away, and leave the editor to find him gone at his leisure; but he felt bound to Mr. Brandreth, and he staid. At last the editor took up a book from the litter of newspapers and manuscripts before him, and said:
“What we want is a rapid and attractive résumé of this book, with particular reference to Coquelin and his place on the stage and in art. No one else has the book yet, and we expect to use the article from it in our Saturday edition. See what you can do with it, and bring it here by ten to-morrow. You can run from one to two thousand words — not over two.”
He handed Ray the book and turned so definitively to his papers and letters again that Ray had no choice but to go. He left with the editor a self respectful parting salutation, which the editor evidently had no use for, and no one showed a consciousness of him, not even the office-boy, as he went out.
He ground his teeth in resentment, but he resolved to take his revenge by making literature of that résumé, and compelling the attention of the editor to him through his work. He lost no time in setting about it; he began to read the book at once, and he had planned his article from it before he reached his hotel. He finished it before he slept, and he went to bed as the first milkman sent his wail through the street below. His heart had worked itself free of its bitterness, and seemed to have imparted its lightness to the little paper, which he was not ashamed of even when he read it after he woke from the short rest he suffered himself. He was sure that the editor of Every Evening must feel the touch which he knew he had imparted to it, and he made his way to him with none of the perturbation, if none of the romantic interest of the day before.
The editor took the long slips which Ray had written his copy on, and struck them open with his right hand while he held them with his left.
“Why the devil,” he demanded, “don’t you write a better hand?” Before Ray could formulate an answer, he shouted again, “Why the devil don’t you begin with a fact?”
He paid no heed to the defence which the hurt author-pride of the young fellow spurred him to make, but went on reading the article through. When he had finished he threw it down and drew toward him a narrow book like a check-book, and wrote in it, and then tore out the page, and gave it to Ray. It was an order on the counting-room for fifteen dollars.
Ray had a weak moment of rage in which he wished to tear it up and fling it in the editor’s face. But he overcame himself and put the order in his pocket. He vowed never to use it, even to save himself from starving, but he kept it because he was ashamed to do otherwise. Even when the editor at the sound of his withdrawal called out, without looking round, “What is your address?” he told him; but this time he wasted no parting salutations upon him.
The hardest part was now to make his acknowledgments to Mr. Brandreth, without letting him know how little his personal interest in the matter had availed. He succeeded in keeping everything from him but the fact that his work had been accepted, and Mr. Brandreth was delighted.
“Well, that’s first-rate, as far as it goes, and I believe it’s going to lead to something permanent. You’ll be the literary man of Every Evening yet; and I understand the paper’s making its way. It’s a good thing to be connected with; thoroughly clean and decent, and yet lively.”
Though Ray hid his wrath from Mr. Brandreth, because it seemed due to his kindness, he let it break out before Kane, whom he found dining alone at his hotel that evening when he came down from his room.
“I don’t know whether I ought to sit down with you,” he began, when Kane begged him to share his table. “I’ve just been through the greatest humiliation I’ve had yet. It’s so thick on me that I’m afraid some of it will come off. And it wasn’t my fault, either; it was my misfortune.”
“We can bear to suffer for our misfortunes,” said Kane, dreamily. “To suffer for our faults would be intolerable, because then we couldn’t preserve our self-respect. Don’t you see? But the consciousness that our anguish is undeserved is consoling; it’s even flattering.”
“I’m sorry to deprive you of a Hard Saying, if that’s one, but my facts are against you.”
“Ah, but facts must always yield to reasons,” Kane began.
Ray would not be stopped. But he suddenly caught the humorous aspect of his adventure with the editor of Every Evening, and gave it with artistic zest. He did not spare his ridiculous hopes or his ridiculous pangs.
From time to time Kane said, at some neat touch: “Oh, good!”
“Very good!”
“Capital!”
“Charming, charming!” When Ray stopped, he drew a long breath, and sighed out: “Yes, I know the man. He’s not a bad fellow. He’s a very good fellow.”
“A good fellow?” Ray demanded. “Why did he behave like a brute, then? He’s the only man who’s been rude to me in New York. Why couldn’t he have shown me the same courtesy that all the publishers have? Every one of them has behaved decently, though none of them, confound them! wanted my book.”
“Ah,” said Kane, “his conditions were different. They had all some little grace of leisure, and according to your report he had none. I don’t know a more pathetic picture than you’ve drawn of him, trying to grasp all those details of his work, and yet seize a new one. It’s frightful. Don’t you feel the pathos of it?”
“No man ought to place himself in conditions where he has to deny himself the amenities of life,” Ray persisted, and he felt that he had made a point, and languaged it well. “He’s to blame if he does.”
“Oh, no man willingly places himself in hateful or injurious conditions,” said Kane. “He is pushed into them, or they grow up about him through the social action. He’s what they shape him to, and when he’s taken his shape from circumstances, he knows instinctively that he won’t fit into others. So he stays put. You would say that the editor of Every Evening ought to forsake his conditions at any cost, and go somewhere else and be a civilized man; but he couldn’t do that without breaking himself in pieces and putting himself together again. Why did I never go back to my own past? I look over my life in New York, and it is chiefly tiresome and futile in the retrospect; I couldn’t really say why I’ve staid here. I don’t expect anything of it, and yet I can’t leave it. The Every Evening man does expect a great deal of his conditions; he expects success, and I understand he’s getting it. But he didn’t place himself in his conditions in any dramatic way, and he couldn’t dramatically break with them. They may be gradually detached from him and then he may slowly change.
Of course there are signal cases of renunciation.
People have abdicated thrones and turned monks; but they’ve not been common, and I dare say, if the whole truth could be known, they have never been half the men they were before, Or become just the saints they intended to be. If you’ll take the most extraordinary instance of modern times, or of all times — if you’ll take Tolstoï himself, you’ll see how impossible it is for a man to rid himself of his environment. Tolstoï believes unquestionably in a life of poverty and toil and trust; but he has not been able to give up his money; he is defended against want by the usual gentlemanly sources of income; and he lives a ghastly travesty of his unfulfilled design. He’s a monumental warning of the futility of any individual attempt to escape from conditions. That’s what I tell my dear old friend Chapley, who’s quite Tolstoï mad, and wants to go into the country and simplify himself.”
“Does he, really?” Ray asked, with a smile.
Why not? Tolstoï convinces your reason and touches your heart. There’s no flaw in h
is logic and no falsity in his sentiment. I think that if Tolstoi had not become a leader, he would have had a multitude of followers.”
The perfection of his paradox afforded Kane the highest pleasure. He laughed out his joy in it, and clapped Ray on the shoulder, and provoked him to praise it, and was so frankly glad of having made it that all Ray’s love of him came back.
XXVI.
FROM one phase of his experience with his story, Ray took a hint, and made bold to ask Mr. Brandreth if he could not give him some manuscripts to read; he had rather a fancy for playing the part of some other man’s destiny since he could have so little to do with deciding his own. Chapley & Co had not much work of that kind to give, but they turned over a number of novels to him, and he read them with a jealous interest; he wished first of all to find whether other people were writing better novels than his, and he hoped to find that they were not. Mostly, they really were not, and they cumulatively strengthened him against an impulse which he had more than once had to burn his manuscript. From certain of the novels he read he got instruction both of a positive and negative kind; for it was part of his business to look at their construction, and he never did this without mentally revising the weak points of his story, and considering how he could repair them.
There was not a great deal of money in this work; but Ray got ten or fifteen dollars for reading a manuscript and rendering an opinion of it, and kept himself from the depravation of waiting for the turn of the cards. He waited for nothing; he worked continually, and he filled up the intervals of the work that was given to him with work that he made for himself. He wrote all sorts of things, — essays, stories, sketches, poems, — and sent them about to the magazines and the weekly newspapers and the syndicates. When the editors were long in reporting upon them he went and asked for a decision; and in audacious moments he carried his manuscript to them, and tried to surprise an instant judgment from them. This, if it were in the case of a poem, or a very short sketch, he could sometimes get; and it was usually adverse, as it usually was in the case of the things he sent them by mail. They were nowhere unkindly; they were often sympathetic, and suggested that what was not exactly adapted to their publications might be adapted to the publication of a fellow-editor; they were willing to sacrifice one another in his behalf. They did not always refuse his contributions. Kane, who witnessed his struggles at this period with an interest which he declared truly paternal, was much struck by the fact that Ray’s failures and successes exactly corresponded to those of business men; that is, he failed ninety-five times out of a hundred to get his material printed. His effort was not of the vast range suggested by these numbers; he had a few manuscripts that were refused many times over, and made up the large sum of his rejections by the peculiar disfavor that followed them.
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