Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh! And you spoke to her after that?”

  There was a provisional condemnation in Kane’s tone which kindled Ray’s temper and gave him strength to retort: “No, Mr. Kane! I spoke to her before that; and it was when I came back — to tell her! Was all wrong, and to beg her pardon — that I saw her father, and heard what I’ve told you.”

  “Oh, I didn’t understand; I might have known that the other thing was impossible,” said Kane.

  They were both silent, and Ray’s anger had died down into the shame that it had flamed up from, when Kane thoughtfully asked, “And you want my advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Concretely?”

  “As concretely as possible.”

  “Then, if you don’t really know the reason why a girl so conscientious as Peace Hughes wouldn’t look at your manuscript again when she was practically left to decide its fate, I think you’d better not go there any more.”

  Kane spoke with a seriousness the more impressive because he was so rarely serious, and Ray felt himself reddening under his eye.

  “Aren’t you rather enigmatical?” he began.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Kane, and then neither spoke.

  Some one knocked at the door. Kane called out, “Come in!” and Mr. Chapley entered.

  After he had shaken hands with Kane and made Ray out, and had shaken hands with him, he said, with not more than his usual dejection, “I’m afraid poor David is in fresh trouble, Kane.”

  “Yes?” said Kane, and Ray waited breathlessly to hear what the trouble was.

  “That wretched son-in-law of his — though I don’t know why I should condemn him — seems to have been somewhere with his children and exposed them to scarlet fever; and he’s down with diphtheritic sore throat himself. Peace has been at home since the trouble declared itself, helping take care of them.”

  “Is it going badly with them?” Kane asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s rather difficult to communicate with the family under the circumstances.”

  “You might have said impossible, without too great violence, Henry,” said Kane.

  “I had thought of seeing their doctor,” suggested Mr. Chapley, with his mild sadness. “Ah, I wish David had stayed where he was.”

  “We are apt to think these things are accidents,” said Kane. “Heaven knows. But scarlet fever and diphtheria are everywhere, and they take better care of them in town than they do in the country. Who did you say their doctor was?”

  “Dear me! I’m sure I don’t know who he is. I promised Mr. Brandreth to look the matter up,” said Mr. Chapley. “He’s very anxious to guard against any spread of the infection to his own child, and my whole family are so apprehensive that’s it’s difficult. I should like to go and see poor David, myself, but they won’t hear of it. They’re quite in a panic as it is.”

  “They’re quite right to guard against the danger,” said Kane, and he added, “I should like to hear David philosophize the situation. I can imagine how he would view the effort of each one of us to escape the consequences that we are all responsible for.”

  “It is civilization which is in the wrong,” said Mr. Chapley.

  “True,” Kane assented. “And yet our Indians suffered terribly from the toothache and rheumatism.

  You can carry your return to nature too far, Henry; Nature must meet Man half-way.” Kane’s eye kindled with pleasure in his phrase, and Ray could perceive that the literary interest was superseding the personal interest in his mind. “The earth is a dangerous planet; the great question is how to get away from it alive,” and the light in Kane’s eyes overspread his face in a smile of deep satisfaction with his paradox.

  The cold-blooded talk of the two elderly men sent a chill to Ray’s heart. For him, at least, there was but one thing to do; and half an hour, later he stood at the open street door of the Hughes apartment, looking up at Mrs. Denton silhouetted against the light on the landing as he had first seen her there.

  “Oh, Mrs. Denton,” he called up, “how are the children?”

  “I — I don’t know. They are very sick. The doctor is afraid” —

  “Oh!” Ray groaned, at the stop she made. “Can I help — can’t I do something? May I come up?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered mechanically, and Ray was stooping forward to mount the stairs when he saw her caught aside, and Peace standing in her place.

  “Don’t come up, Mr. Ray! You can’t do any good. It’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t care for the danger,” he began. “Some one — some one must help you! Your father “— “My father doesn’t need any help, and we don’t Every moment you stay makes the danger worse!”

  “But you, you are in danger! You” —

  “It’s my right to be. But it’s wrong for you. Oh, do go away!” She wrung her hands, and he knew that she was weeping. “I do thank you for coming. I was afraid you would come.”

  “Oh, were you?” he exulted. “I am glad of that! You know how I must have felt, when I came to think what I had said.”

  “Yes — but, go, now!”

  “How can I do that? I should be ashamed” —

  “But you mustn’t,” she entreated. “It would put others in danger, too. You would carry the infection. You must go,” she repeated.

  “Well, I shall come again. I must know how it is with you. When may I come again!”

  “I don’t know. You mustn’t come inside again.” She thought a moment. “If you come I will speak to you from that window over the door. You must keep outside. If you will ring the bell twice, I shall know it is you.”

  She shut the door, and left him no choice but to obey. It was not heroic; it seemed cowardly; and he turned ruefully away. But he submitted, and twice a day, early in the morning and late at night, he came and rang for her. The neighbors, such as cared, understood that he was the friend of the family who connected its exile with the world; sometimes the passers mistook these sad trysts for the happy lovers’ meetings which they resembled, and lingered to listen, and then passed on.

  They caught only anxious questions and hopeless answers; the third morning that Ray came, Peace told him that the little ones were dead.

  They had passed out of the world together, as they had entered it, and Ray stood with their mother beside the grave where they were both laid, and let her cling to his hand as if he were her brother. Her husband was too sick to be with them, and there had been apparently no question of Hughes’s coming, but Peace was there. The weather was that of a day in late March, bitter with a disappointed hope of spring. Ray went back to their door with the mourners. The mother kept on about the little ones, as if the incidents of their death were facts of a life that was still continuing.

  “Oh, I know well enough,” she broke off from this illusion, “that they are gone, and I shall never see them again; perhaps their father will. Well, I don’t think I was so much to blame. I didn’t make myself, and I never asked to come here, any more than they did.”

  She had the woe-begone hopeless face which she wore the first day that Ray saw her, after the twins had thrown her porte-monnaie out of the car window; she looked stunned and stupefied.

  They let her talk on, mostly without interruption. Only, at this point Peace said, “That will be thought of, Jenny,” and the other asked, wistfully, “Do you think so, Peace? Well!”

  XXXII.

  PEACE did not come back to her work at the publishers’ for several weeks. The arrears began to accumulate, and Mr. Brandreth asked Kay to help look after it; Ray was now so often with him that their friendly acquaintance had become a confidential intimacy.

  Men’s advance in these relations is rapid, even in later life; in youth it is by bounds. Before a week of their daily contact was out, Ray knew that Mrs. Chapley, though the best soul in the world, and the most devoted of mothers and grandmothers, had, in Mr. Brandreth’s opinion, a bad influence on his wife, and through her on his son. She excited Mrs. Brandreth by the long v
isits she paid her; and she had given the baby medicine on one occasion at least that distinctly had not agreed with it. “That boy has taken so much belladonna, as a preventive of scarlet fever, that I believe it’s beginning to affect his eyes. The pupils are tremendously enlarged, and he doesn’t notice half as much as he did a month ago. I don’t know when Mrs. Chapley will let us have Miss Hughes back again. Of course, I believe in taking precautions too, and I never could forgive myself if anything really happened. But I don’t want to be a perfect slave to my fears, or my mother-in-law’s, either — should you?”

  He asked Ray whether, under the circumstances, he did not think he ought to get some little place near New York for the summer, rather than go to his country home in Massachusetts, where the Chapleys had a house, and where his own mother lived the year round. When Ray shrank from the question as too personal for him to deal with, Mr. Brandreth invited him to consider the more abstract proposition that if the two grandmothers had the baby there to quarrel over all summer, they would leave nothing of the baby, and yet would not part friends.

  “I’ll tell you another reason why I want to be near my business so as to keep my finger on it all the time, this year,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he went into a long and very frank study of the firm’s affairs with Ray, who listened with the discreet intelligence which made everybody trust him. “With Mr. Chapley in the state he’s got into about business, when he doesn’t care two cents whether school keeps or not, I see that I’ve got to take the reins more and more into my own hands.” Mr. Brandreth branched off into an examination of his own character, and indirectly paid himself some handsome tributes as a business man. “I don’t mean to say,” he concluded, “that I’ve got the experience of some of the older men, but I do mean to say that experience doesn’t count for half of what they claim, in the book business, and I can prove it out of their own mouths. They all admit that nobody can forecast the fate of a book. Of coarse if you’ve got a book by a known author, you’ve got something to count on, but not so much as people think, and some unknown man may happen along with a thing that hits the popular mood and outsell him ten times over. It’s a perfect lottery.”

  “I wonder they let you send your lists of new publications through the mails,” said Ray, dryly.

  “Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Though there are a good many blanks too. I suppose the moral difference between business and gambling is that in business you do work for a living, and you don’t propose to give nothing for something, even when you’re buying as cheap as you can to sell as dear as you can. With a book it’s even better. It’s something you’ve put value into, and you have a right to expect to get value out of it. That’s what I tell Mr. Chapley when he gets into one of his Tolstoi moods, and wants to give his money to the poor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”

  The two young men laughed at these grotesque conceptions of duty, and Mr. Brandreth went on:

  “Yes, sir, if I could get hold of a good, strong, lively novel” —

  “Well, there is always A Modem Romeo,” Ray suggested.

  Mr. Brandreth winced. “I know.” He added, with the effect of hurrying to get away from the subject, “I’ve had it over and over again with Mr. Chapley till I’m tired of it Well, I suppose it’s his age, somewhat, too. Every man, when he gets to Mr. Chapley’s time of life, wants to go into the country and live on the land. I’d like to see him living on the land in Hatboro’, Massachusetts! You can stand up in your buggy and count half-a-dozen abandoned farms wherever you’ve a mind to stop on the road. By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, from an association of ideas that Ray easily followed, “have you seen anything of the book that Mr. Hughes is writing? He’s got a good title for it. ‘The World Revisited’ ought to sell the first edition of it at a go.”

  “Before people found out what strong meat it was? It condemns the whole structure of society; he’s read me parts of it.”

  “Well, well,” said Mr. Brandreth, in a certain perplexity, “that might make it go too. People like strong meat. They like to have the structure of society condemned. There’s a good deal of sympathy with the underpinning; there’s no use trying to deny it Confound it! I should like to try such a book as that in the market But it would be regarded by everybody who knew him as an outcome of Mr. Chapley’s Tolstoï twist.”

  “I understand that Mr. Hughes’s views are entirely opposed to Tolstoï’s. He regards him as unpractical,” said Ray, with a smile for Hughes’s practicality.

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. They would call it Tolstoïan on Mr. Chapley’s account People don’t know. There was Looking Backward; they took that at a gulp, and didn’t know that it was the rankest sort of socialism. My! If I could get hold of a book like Looking Backward!”

  “I might have it come out that the wicked cousin in A Modem Romeo was a secret Anarchist That ought to make the book’s fortune.”

  Ray could deal lightly with his rejected novel, but even while he made an open jest of it, the book was still inwardly dear to him. He still had his moments of thinking it a great book, in places. He was always mentally comparing it with other novels that came out, and finding it better. He could not see why they should have got publishers, and his book not; he had to fall back upon that theory of mere luck which first so emboldens and then so embitters the heart; and the hope that lingered in him was mixed with cynicism.

  XXXIII.

  WHEN Peace came back to her work, Mr. Brandreth, in admiration of her spirit, confided to Bay that she had refused to take pay for the time she had been away, and that no arguments availed with her.

  “They must have been at unusual expense on account of this sickness, and I understand that the son-in-law hasn’t earned anything for a month. But what can you do?”

  “You can’t do anything,” said Ray. Their poverty might be finally reached from without, and it was not this which made him chiefly anxious in his futile sympathy for Peace. He saw her isolated in the presence of troubles from which he was held as far aloof as her father lived in his dream of a practicable golden age. Their common sorrow, which ought to have drawn the mother and father of the dead children nearer together, seemed to have alienated them. After the first transports of her grief Mrs. Denton appeared scarcely to miss the little ones; the cat, which they had displaced so rarely, was now always in her lap, and her idle, bantering talk went on, about anything, about everything, as before, but with something more of mockery for her husband’s depressions and exaltations. It might have been from a mistaken wish to rouse him to some sort of renewed endeavor that she let her reckless tongue run upon what he had done with his process; it might have been from her perception that he was most vulnerable there; Ray could not decide. For the most part Denton remained withdrawn from the rest, a shadow and a silence which they ignored. Sometimes he broke in with an irrelevant question or comment, but oftener he evaded answering when they spoke to him. If his wife pressed him at such times he left them; and then they heard him talking to himself in his room, after an old habit of his; now and then Ray thought he was praying. If he did not come back, Peace followed him, and then her voice could be heard in entreaty with him.

  “She’s the only one that can do anything with Ansel,” her sister lightly explained one evening. “She has so much patience with him; father hasn’t any more than I have; but Peace can persuade him out of almost anything except his great idea of sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice?” Ray repeated.

  “Yes. I don’t know what he means. But he thinks he’s been very wicked, trying to invent that process, and he can’t get forgiveness without some kind of sacrifice. He’s found it in the Old Testament somewhere. I tell him it’s a great pity he didn’t live in the days of the prophets; he might have passed for one. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He says we must make some sacrifice; but I can’t see what we’ve got left to sacrifice. We might make a burnt offering of the chairs in father’s stove; the coal’s about gone.�
�

  She stopped, and looked up at Denton, who had come in with a book in his hand; Peace glided in behind him.

  “Oh, are you going to read us something, Ansel?” his wife asked with her smile of thoughtless taunting. “I don’t see why you don’t give public readings. You could read better than the elocutionists that used to read to us in the Family. And it wouldn’t be taking the bread out of any one else’s mouth.” She turned to Ray: “You know Ansel’s given up his place so as to let another man have his chance. It was the least he could do after he had tried to take away the livelihood of so many by inventing that wicked process of his.”

  Denton gave no sign of having heard her. He fixed his troubled eyes on Ray. “Do you know that poem?” he asked, handing him the open book.

  “Oh, yes,” said Ray.

  “It’s a mistake,” said Denton, “all a mistake. I should like to write to Tennyson and tell him so. I’ve thought it out. The true sacrifice would have been the best, not the dearest; the best.”

  The next day was Sunday, and it broke, with that swift, capricious heat of our climate, after several days of cloudy menace. The sun shone, and the streets were thronged with people. They were going to church in different directions, but there was everywhere a heavy trend toward the stations of the elevated road, and the trains were crammed with men, women and children going to the Park. When Ray arrived there with one of the throngs he had joined, he saw the roads full of carriages, and in the paths black files of foot-passengers pushing on past the seats packed with those who had come earlier, and sat sweltering under the leafless trees. The grass was already green; some of the forwarder shrubs were olive-gray with buds.

  Ray walked deep into the Park. He came in sight of a bench near a shelf of rock in a by-path, with a man sitting alone on it. There was room for two, and Ray made for the place.

  The man sat leaning forward with his heavy blonde head hanging down as if he might have been drunk. He suddenly lifted himself, and Ray saw that it was Denton. His face was red from the blood that had run into it, but as it grew paler it showed pathetically thin. He stared at Ray confusedly, and did not know him till he spoke.