Hughes was drawn by the noise, and put his head into the room.
“We’ve got the old original Ansel back, father!” cried Mrs. Denton, and she clapped her hands and tried to sing to the dance, but broke down, and mocked at her own failure.
When Denton stopped breathless, Peace took the children from him, and carried them away. His wife remained.
“Ansel was brought up among the Shakers; that’s the reason he dances so nicely.”
“Oh, was that a Shaker dance?” Ray asked, carelessly.
“No. The Shaker dance is a rite,” said Denton, angrily. “You might as well expect me to burlesque a prayer.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Ray. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”
But Denton left the room without visible acceptance of his excuse.
“You must be careful how you say anything about the Shakers before Ansel,” his wife explained. “I believe he would be willing to go back to them now, if he knew what to do with the children and me.”
“If it were not for their unpractical doctrine of celibacy,” said Hughes, “the Shakers, as a religious sect, could perform a most useful office in the transition from the status to better conditions. They are unselfish, and most communities are not.”
“We might all go back with Ansel,” said Mrs. Denton, “and they could distribute us round in the different Families. I wonder if Ansel’s bull is hanging up in the South Family bam yet? You know,” she said, “he painted a red bull on a piece of shingle when they were painting the barn one day, and nailed it up in a stall; when the elders found it they labored with him, and then Ansel left the community, and went out into the world. But they say, once a Shaker always a Shaker, and I believe he’s had a bad conscience ever since he’s left them.”
Not long after this Ray came in one night dressed for a little dance that he was going to later, and Mrs. Denton had some moments alone with him before Peace joined them. She made him tell where he was going, and who the people were that were giving the dance, and what it would all be like — the rooms and decorations, the dresses, the supper.
“And don’t you feel very strange and lost, in such places?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ray. “I can’t always remember that I’m a poor Bohemian with two cents in my pocket. Sometimes I imagine myself really rich and fashionable. But to-night I shan’t, thank you, Mrs. Denton.”
She laughed at the look he gave her in acknowledgment of her little scratch. “Then you wouldn’t refuse to come to a little dance here, if we were rich enough to give one?” she asked.
“I would come instantly.”
“And get your fashionable friends to come?”
“That might take more time. When are you going to give your little dance?”
“As soon as Ansel’s invention is finished.”
“Oh! Is he going on with that?”
“Yes. He has seen how he can do more good than harm with it — at last.”
“Ah! We can nearly always coax conscience along the path of self-interest.”
This pleased Mrs. Denton too. “That sounds like Mr. Kane.”
Peace came in while Mrs. Denton was speaking, and gave Ray her hand, with a glance at his splendor, enhanced by his stylish manner of holding his silk hat against his thigh.
“Who was it told you that Mr. Kane was sick?” Mrs. Denton asked.
Peace answered, “Mr. Chapley.”
“Kane? Is Mr. Kane sick?” said Ray. “I must go and see him.”
He asked Peace some questions about Kane, but she knew nothing more than that Mr. Chapley said he was not very well, and he was going to step round and see him on his way home. Ray thought of the grudge he had borne for a while against Kane, and he was very glad now that there was none left in his heart.
“It’s too late to-night; but I’ll go in the morning. He usually drops in on me Sundays; he didn’t come last Sunday; but I never thought of his being sick.” He went on to praise Kane, and he said, as if it were one of Kane’s merits, “He’s been a good friend of mine. He read my novel all over after Chapley declined it, and tried to find enough good in it to justify him in recommending it to some other publisher. I don’t blame him for failing, but I did feel hard about his refusing to look at it afterwards; I couldn’t help it for a while.” He was speaking to Peace, and he said, as if it were something she would be cognizant of, “I mean when Mr. Brandreth sent for it again after he first rejected it.”
“Yes,” she admitted, briefly, and he was subtly aware of the withdrawal which he noticed in her whenever the interest of the moment became personal.
But there was never any shrinking from the personal interest in Mrs. Denton; her eagerness to explore all his experiences and sentiments was vivid and untiring.
“Why did he send for it?” she asked. “What in the world for?”
Ray was willing to tell, for he thought the whole affair rather creditable to himself. “He wanted to submit it to a friend of mine; and if my friend’s judgment was favorable he might want to reconsider his decision. He returned the manuscript the same day, with a queer note which left me to infer that my mysterious friend had already seen it, and had seen enough of it. I knew it was Mr. Kane, and for a while I wanted to destroy him. But I forgave him, when I thought it all over.”
“It was pretty mean of him,” said Mrs. Denton.
“No, no! He had a perfect right to do it, and I had no right to complain. But it took me a little time to own it.”
Mrs. Denton turned to Peace. “Did you know about it?”
Denton burst suddenly into the room, and stared distractedly about as if he were searching for something.
“What is it, Ansel?” Peace asked.
“That zinc plate.”
“It’s on the bureau,” said his wife.
He was rushing out, when she recalled him.
“Here’s Mr. Ray.”
He turned, and glanced at Ray impatiently, as if he were eager to get back to his work; but the gloomy face which he usually wore was gone; his eyes expressed only an intense preoccupation through which gleamed a sudden gayety, as if it flashed into them from some happier time in the past. “Oh, yes,” he said to his wife, while he took hold of Ray’s arm and turned him about; “this is the way you want me to look.”
“As soon as your process succeeds, I expect you to look that way all the time. And I’m going to go round and do my work in a low-neck dress; and we are going to have champagne at every meal. I am going to have a day, on my card, and I am going to have afternoon teas and give dinners. We are going into the best society.”
Denton slid his hand down Ray’s arm, and kept Ray’s hand in his hot clasp while he rapidly asked him about the side of his life which that costume represented, as though now for the first time he had a reason for caring to know anything of the world and its pleasures.
“And those people don’t do anything else?” he asked, finally.
“Isn’t it enough?” Ray retorted. “They think they do a great deal.”
Denton laughed in a strange nervous note, catching his breath, and keeping on involuntarily. “Yes; too much. I pity them.”
“Well,” said his wife, “I want to be an object of pity as soon as possible. Don’t lose any more time, now, Ansel, from that precious process.” The light went out of his face again, and he jerked his head erect sharply, like one listening, while he stood staring at her. “Oh, now, don’t be ridiculous, Ansel!” she said.
XXIX.
THE next day after a little dance does not dawn very early. Ray woke late, with a vague trouble in his mind, which he thought at first was the sum of the usual regrets for awkward things done and foolish things said the night before. Presently it shaped itself as an anxiety which had nothing to do with the little dance, and which he was helpless to deal with when he recognized it. Still, as a definite anxiety, it was more than half a question, and his experience did not afford him the means of measuring its importance
or ascertaining its gravity. He carried it loosely in his mind when he went to see Kane, as something he might or might not think of.
Kane was in bed, convalescent from a sharp gastric attack, and he reached Ray a soft moist hand across the counterpane and cheerily welcomed him. His coat and hat hung against a closet door, and looked so like him that they seemed as much part of him as his hair and beard, which were smoothly brushed, and gave their silver delicately against the pillow. A fire of soft coal purred in the grate, faded to a fainter flicker by the sunlight that poured in at the long south windows, and lit up the walls book-lined from floor to ceiling.
“Yes,” he said, in acceptance of the praises of its comfort that Ray burst out with, “I have lived in this room so long that I begin to cherish the expectation of dying in it. But, really, is this the first time you’ve been here?”
“The first,” said Ray. “I had to wait till you were helpless before I got in.”
“Ah, no; ah, no! Not so bad as that. I’ve often meant to ask you, when there was some occasion; but there never seemed any occasion; and I’ve lived here so much alone that I’m rather selfish about my solitude; I like to keep it to myself. But I’m very glad to see you; it was kind of you to think of coming.” He bent a look of affection on the young fellow’s handsome face. “Well, how wags the gay world?” he asked.
“Does the gay world do anything so light-minded as to wag?” Ray asked in his turn, with an intellectual coxcombry that he had found was not offensive to Kane. “It always seems to me very serious as a whole, the gay world, though it has its reliefs, when it tries to enjoy itself.” He leaned back in his chair, and handled his stick a moment, and then he told Kane about the little dance which he had been at the night before. He sketched some of the people and made it amusing.
“And which of your butterfly friends told you I was ill?” asked Kane.
“The butterflyest of all: Mrs. Denton.”
“Oh! Did she give the little dance?”
“No. I dropped in at the Hugheses’ on the way to the dance. But I don’t know how soon she may be doing something of the kind. They’re on the verge of immense prosperity. Her husband has invented a new art process, and it’s going to make them rich. He doesn’t seem very happy about it, but she does. He’s a dreary creature. At first I used to judge her rather severely, as we do with frivolous people. But I don’t know that frivolity is so bad; I doubt if it’s as bad as austerity; they’re both merely the effect of temperament, it strikes me. I like Mrs. Denton, though she does appear to care more for the cat than the twins. Perhaps she thinks she can safely leave them to him. He’s very devoted to them; it’s quite touching. It’s another quality of paternal devotion from Mr. Brandreth’s; it isn’t half so voluble. But it’s funny, all the same, to see how much more care of them he takes than their mother does. He looks after them at table, and he carries them off and puts them to bed with his own hands apparently,” said Ray, in celibate contempt of the paternal tenderness.
“I believe that in David’s community,” Kane suggested, “the male assisted the female in the care of their offspring. We still see the like in some of the feathered tribes. In the process of social evolution the father bird will probably leave the baby bird entirely to the mother bird; and the mother bird, as soon as she begins to have mind and money, will hire in some poor bird to look after them. Mrs. Denton seems to have evolved in the direction of leaving them entirely to the father bird.”
“Well, she has to do most of the talking. Have you ever heard,” Ray asked from the necessary association of ideas, “about her husband’s Voice?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, it seems that Mr. Denton has an inward monitor of some kind, like the demon of Socrates, that they call a Voice, and that directs his course in life, as I understand. I suppose it’s authorized him to go on with his process, which he was doubtful about for a good while, because if it succeeded it would throw a lot of people out of work. Then you’ve never heard of his Voice?”
“No,” said Kane. He added: “I suppose it’s part of the psychical nonsense that they go into in all sorts of communities. And Hughes,” he asked after a moment—” how is Hughes now?”
“He’s generally busy with his writing, and I don’t always see him. He’s a fine old fellow, if he does prefer to call me out of my name; he still addresses me generally as Young Man. Mrs. Denton has tried to teach him better; but he says that names are the most external of all things, and that I am no more essentially Ray than I am Hughes. There’s something in it; I think one might get a kind of story out of the notion.”
Kane lay silent in a pensive muse, which he broke to ask with a smile: “And how is Peace these days? Do you see her?”
“Yes; she’s very well, I believe,” said Ray, briefly, and he rose.
“Oh!” said Kane, “must you go?”
He kept Ray’s hand affectionately, and seemed loath to part with him. “I’m glad you don’t forget the Hugheses in the good time you’re having. It shows character in you not to mind their queerness; I’m sure you won’t regret it. Your visits are a great comfort to them, I know. I was afraid that you would not get over the disagreeable impression of that first Sunday, and I’ve never been sure that you’d quite forgiven me for taking you.”
“Oh yes, I had,” said Ray, and he smiled with the pleasure we all feel when we have a benefaction attributed to us. “I’ve forgiven you much worse things than that!”
“Indeed! You console me! But for example?”
“Refusing to look at my novel a second time,” answered Ray, by a sudden impulse.
“I don’t understand you,” said Kane, letting his hand go.
“When Mr. Brandreth offered to submit it to you in the forlorn hope that you might like it and commend it.”
“Brandreth never asked me to look at it at all; the only time I saw it was when you let me take it home with me. What do you mean?”
“Mr. Brandreth wrote me saying he wanted to try it on a friend of mine, and it came back the same day with word that my friend had already seen it,” said Ray, in an astonishment which Kane openly shared. “And was that the reason you were so cold with me for a time? Well, I don’t wonder! You had a right to expect that I would say anything in your behalf under the circumstances. And I’m afraid I should. But I never was tempted. Perhaps Brandreth got frightened and returned the manuscript with that message because he knew he couldn’t trust me.”
“Perhaps,” said Ray, blankly.
“Who else could it have been? Have you any surmise?”
“What is the use of surmising?” Ray retorted. “It’s all over. The story is dead, and I wish it was buried. Don’t bother about it! And try to forgive me for suspecting you.”
“It was very natural. But you ought to have known that I loved you too much not to sacrifice a publisher to you if I had him fairly in my hand.”
“Oh, thank you! And — good-by. Don’t think anything more about it. I sha’n’t.”
XXX.
THERE could be only one answer to the riddle, if Kane’s suggestion that Mr. Brandreth had returned the manuscript without showing it to any one were rejected. The publisher could speak of no one besides Kane as a friend except Miss Hughes, and it was clearly she who had refused to look again at Ray’s book. She had played a double part with him; she had let him make a fool of himself; she had suffered him to keep coming to her, and reading his things to her, and making her his literary confidante. He ground his teeth with shame to think how he had sought her advice and exulted in her praise; but the question was not merely, it was not primarily, a question of truth or untruth, kindness or unkindness toward himself, but of justice toward Kane. He had told her of the resentment he had felt toward Kane; he had left her to the belief that he still suspected Kane of what she had done. If she were willing that he should remain in this suspicion, it was worse than anything he now accused her of.
He kept away from Chapley’s all day, because of
the embarrassment of seeing her with that in his mind. He decided that he must never see her again till she showed some wish to be relieved from the false position she had suffered herself to be placed in. At the end of the afternoon there came a knock at his door, and he set the door open and confronted Mr. Brandreth, who stood smiling at the joke of his being there, with his lustrous silk hat and gloves and light overcoat on. Ray passed some young banter with him in humorous recognition of the situation, before they came to business, as Mr. Brandreth called it.
“Look here!” said the publisher, with a quizzical glance at him from Ray’s easy-chair, while Ray himself lounged on the edge of his bed. “Did you think I wanted to show your novel to old Kane, that time when I sent back for it?”
“Yes,” said Ray; and he could not say any more for his prescience of what was coming.
“Well, I didn’t,” Mr. Brandreth returned. “And if I’d ever thought you suspected him, I should have told you so long ago. The person that I did want it for is anxious you should know it wasn’t Kane, and I thought I’d better come and tell you so by word of mouth; I rather made a mess of it before, in writing. If you’ve any feeling about the matter, it’s only fair to Kane to assure you that he wasn’t at all the person.”
“Kane told me so himself to-day,” said Ray; “and all the grudge I felt was gone long ago.”
“Well, of course! It’s a matter of business.” In turning it off in this common-sense way Mr. Brandreth added lightly, “I’m authorized to tell you who it really was, if you care to know.”
Ray shook his head. “I don’t care to know. What’s the use?”
“There isn’t any. I’m glad you take it the way you do, and it will be a great relief to — the real one.”
“It’s all right.”
Bay had been strengthening his defences against any confidential approach from the moment Mr. Brandreth began to speak; he could not help it Now they began to talk of other things. At the end the publisher returned to the book with a kind of desperate sigh: “You haven’t done anything with your story yet, I suppose?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 526
