Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  From time to time Ray made a little apologetic show of not meaning to do more than glance the review over, but Mr. Brandreth insisted upon his taking his time and reading it all; he wanted to talk to him about it. He began to talk before Ray finished; in fact he agonized him with question and comment, all through; and when Ray laid the paper down at last, he came and sat on the edge of his bed.

  “Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t believe in working on Sunday, and that sort of thing; but I believe this is providential. My wife does, too; she says it’s a reward for the faith we’ve had in the book; and that it would be a sin to lose a moment’s time. If there is to be any catch-on at all, it must be instantaneous; we mustn’t let the effect of this review get cold, and I’m going to strike while it’s red-hot.” The word seem to suggest the magnitude of the purpose which Mr. Brandreth expressed with seriousness that befitted the day. “I’m simply going to paint the universe red. You’ll see.”

  “Well, well,” said Ray, “you’d better not tell me how. I guess I’ve got as much as I can stand, now.”

  “If that book doesn’t succeed,” said Mr. Brandreth, as solemnly as if registering a vow, “it won’t be my fault.”

  He went away, and Ray passed into a trance such as wraps a fortunate lover from the outer world. But nothing was further from his thoughts than love. The passion that possessed him was egotism flattered to an intensity in which he had no life but in the sense of himself. No experience could be more unwholesome while it lasted, but a condition so intense could not endure. His first impulse was to keep away from every one who could keep him from the voluptuous sense of his own success. He knew very well that the review in the Metropolis overrated his book, but he liked it to be overrated; he wilfully renewed his delirium from it by reading it again and again, over his breakfast, on the train to the Park, and in the lonely places which he sought out there apart from all who could know him or distract him from himself. At first it seemed impossible; at last it became unintelligible. He threw the paper into some bushes; then after he had got a long way off, he went back and recovered it, and read the review once more. The sense had returned, the praises had resumed their fires; again he bathed his spirit in their splendor. It was he, he, he, of whom those things were said. He tried to realize it. Who was he? The question scared him; perhaps he was going out of his mind. At any rate he must get away from himself now; that was his only safety. He thought whom he should turn to for refuge. There were still people of his society acquaintance in town, and he could have had a cup of tea poured for him by a charming girl at any one of a dozen friendly houses. There were young men, more than enough of them, who would have welcomed him to their bachelor quarters. There was old Kane. But they would have all begun to talk to him about that review; Peace herself would have done so. He ended by going home, and setting to work on some notices for the next day’s Every Evening. The performance was a play of double consciousness in which he struggled with himself as if with some alien personality. But the next day he could take the time to pay Mr. Brandreth a visit without wronging the work he had carried so far.

  On the way he bought the leading morning papers, and saw that the publisher had reprinted long extracts from the Metropolis review as advertisments in the type of the editorial page; in the Metropolis itself he reprinted the whole review. “This sort of thing will be in the principal Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis papers just as soon as the mail can carry them my copy. I had thought of telegraphing the advertisement, but it will cost money enough as it is,” said Mr. Brandreth.

  “Are you sure you’re not throwing your money away?” Ray asked, somewhat aghast.

  “I’m sure I’m not throwing my chance away,” the publisher retorted with gay courage. He developed the plan of campaign as he had conceived it, and Ray listened with a kind of nerveless avidity. He looked over at Mr. Chapley’s room, where he knew that Peace was busily writing, and he hoped that she did not know that he was there. His last talk with her had mixed itself up with the intense experience that had followed, and seemed of one frantic quality with it He walked out to the street door with Mr. Brandreth beside him, and did not turn for a glimpse of her.

  “Oh by-the-way,” said the publisher at parting, “if you’d been here a little sooner, I could have made you acquainted with your reviewer. He dropped in a little while ago to ask who S. Ray was, and I did my best to make him believe it was a real name. I don’t think he was more than half convinced.”

  “I don’t more than half believe in him,” said Ray, lightly, to cover his disappointment. “Who is he?”

  “Well, their regular man is off on sick leave, and this young fellow — Worrell is his name — is a sort of under study. He was telling me how he happened to go in for your book — those things are always interesting. He meant to take another book up to his house with him, and he found he had yours when he got home, and some things about hypnotism. He went through them, and then he thought he would just glance at yours, anyway, and he opened on the hypnotic trance scene, just when his mind was full of the subject, and he couldn’t let go. He went back to the beginning and read it all through, and then he gave you the benefit of the other fellow’s chance. He wanted to see you, when I told him about you. Curious how these things fall out, half the time?”

  “Very,” said Ray, rather blankly.

  “I knew you’d enjoy it.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  XLIII.

  WHETHER the boom for A Modem Romeo which began with the appearance of the Metropolis review was an effect of that review or not, no one acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say. There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in the Metropolis which had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book was due wholly to its merit.

  “And what was its long failure due to?” Ray asked, tasting the bitter of the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.

  “To its demerit.”

  Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review; afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which, in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize. What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers’ windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow it was in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say; he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross, palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while he remained seated. It was specially confided to lady readers that his slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as smooth and pure as a girl’s. The processed reproduction of Ray’s photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes, it
brought him a letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in their studies of him; at the Every Evening office, where their visits subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray’s celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews, he took occasion to say: “I like your work and I want to keep you. As it is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I prefer to anticipate, and you’ll find it put up in your next check to the figure which I think the paper ought to stand.” He did not otherwise recognize the fact of the book’s success, or speak of it; as compared with his paper, Ray’s book was of no importance to him whatever.

  The interviews were always flattering to Ray’s vanity, in a certain way, but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it and read it. In some cases they came to him with poetic preoccupations from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much stranger than fiction.

  “Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book,” one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly upon the author’s, “it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in the whole history of literature. Won’t you tell me the truth about it, Mr. Ray?”

  “Why, I don’t know the truth about it myself,” Ray said.

  “Oh, how delightful!” cried the young lady. “I’m going to put that in, at any rate;” and she continued to work the young author with her appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of telling.

  He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six months among the trade?”

  Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of recollection, “Oh! That girl! Well, she was determined to have something exclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you that when I chanced it on this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”

  “That is interesting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to pose as your preserver.”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested. “And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife, and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that girl what she repeated to you.”

  “Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even tragical.”

  “Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made it right with Mr. Hughes.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right with him,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken his book and would bring it out at once.”

  Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that. But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended, cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know that A Modem Romeo has come of age; we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”

  “Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to fifty thousand by this time.

  The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it did not. Had it, by some process of natural selection, reached exactly those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make, and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue? He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr. Brandreth.

  Finally, Kane said: “Why do we always seek a law for things? Is there a law for ourselves? We think so, but it’s out of sight for the most part, and generally we act from mere caprice, from impulse. I’ve lived a good many years, but I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve seen the cause overtaken by the consequence more than two or three times; then it struck me as rather theatrical. Consequences I’ve seen a plenty, but not causes. Perhaps this is merely a sphere of ultimations. We used to flatter ourselves, in the simple old days, when we thought we were all miserable sinners, that we were preparing tremendous effects, to follow elsewhere, by what we said and did here. But what if the things that happen here are effects initiated elsewhere?”

  “It’s a very pretty conjecture,” said Ray, “but it doesn’t seem to have a very direct bearing on the falling off in the sale of A Modem Romeo.”

  “Everything in the universe is related to that book, if you could only see it properly. If it has stopped selling, it is probably because the influence of some favorable star, extinguished thousands of years ago, has just ceased to reach this planet.”

  Kane had the air of making a mental note after he said this, and Ray began to laugh. “There ought to be money in that,” he said.

  “No, there is no money in Hard Sayings,” Kane returned, sadly; “there is only — wisdom.”

  Ray was by no means discouraged with his failures to divine the reason for the arrested sale of his book. At heart he was richly satisfied with its success, and he left the public without grudging, to their belief that it had sold a hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Brandreth was satisfied, too. He believed that the sale would pick up again in the fall after people got back from the country; he had discovered that the book had enduring qualities; but now the question was, what was Ray going to write next? “You ought to strike while the iron’s hot, you know.”

  “Of course, I’ve been thinking about that,” the young fellow admitted, “and I believe I’ve got a pretty good scheme for a novel.”

  “Could you give me some notion of it?”

  “No, I couldn’t. It hasn’t quite crystallized in my mind
yet. And I don’t believe it will, somehow, till I get a name for it.”

  “Have you thought of a name?”

  “Yes — half-a-dozen that won’t do.”

  “There’s everything in a name,” said the publisher. “I believe it made the Modem Romeo’s fortune.”

  Ray mused a moment. “How would A Rose by any other Name do?”

  “That’s rather attractive,” said Mr. Brandreth.

  “Well, anyway, remember that we are to have the book.”

  Ray hesitated. “Well — not on those old ten-percent terms, Brandreth.”

  “Oh, I think we can arrange the terms all right,” said Mr. Brandreth.

  “Because I can do much better, you know.”

  “Oh, they’ve been after you, have they?”

  The young fellow held up the fingers of one hand.

  “Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “your next book belongs to Chapley & Co. You want to keep your books together. One will help sell the other. A Rose by any other Name will wake up A Modem Romeo when it comes out.”

  XLIV.

  FOR Peace Hughes and her sister, the summer passed uneventfully. The girl made up for the time she had lost earlier in the year by doing double duty at the increased business of the publishing house. The prosperity of A Modem Romeo had itself added to her work, and the new enterprises which its success had inspired Mr. Brandreth to consider meant more letter-writing and more formulation of the ideas which he struck shapelessly if boldly out He trusted her advice as well as her skill, and she had now become one of the regular readers for Chapley & Co.

  Ray inferred this from the number of manuscripts which he saw on her table at home, and he could not help knowing the other things through his own acquaintance, which was almost an intimacy, with Mr. Brandreth’s affairs. The publisher was always praising her. “Talk about men!” he broke out one day. “That girl has a better business head than half the business men in New York. If she were not a woman, it would be only a question of time when we should have to offer her a partnership, or run the risk of losing her. But there’s only one kind of partnership you can offer a woman.” Ray flushed, but he did not say anything, and Mr. Brandreth asked, apparently from some association in his mind, “Do you see much of them at their new place?”