Part 10

It did strike Ray as a good notion; something might be done with it, say in a Christmas story, if you could get hold of a tenement-house incident of that kind, and keep it from becoming allegorical in the working out.

This went through Ray’s mind as he stood thinking also how he should ask the girl for his manuscript and the criticisms on it without seeming foolishly eager. Her father’s formidable intervention had dispensed him from the usual greetings, and he could only say, “Oh! Miss Hughes, Mr. Brandreth told me I might come and get my story of you--_A Modern Romeo_--and the readers’ opinions. I--I thought I should like to look them over; and--and”--

“I haven’t had time to copy them yet,” she answered. “Mr. Brandreth wished you to see them; but we keep the readers anonymous, and he thought I had better show them to you all in my handwriting.”

“I shouldn’t know the writers. He said I could see them as they are.”

“Well, then, I will go and get them for you,” she answered. She left him a moment, and he remained with her father unmolested. The old man sat staring out on the avenue, with his head black against its gathering lights.

She gave him the packet she brought back with her, and then she followed him out of the apartment upon the landing, after he had made his acknowledgments and adieux.

“I thought,” she said, timidly, “you would like to know that I had given your dollar for these poor children. Was that right?”

Ray’s head was so full of his story that he answered vaguely, “My dollar?” Then he remembered. “Oh! Oh yes! It was right--quite right! I’m glad you did it. Miss Hughes! Excuse me; but would you mind telling me whether you have happened to look at the story yourself?”

She hesitated, and then answered: “Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Oh, then,” he bubbled out, knowing that he was wrong and foolish, but helpless to refrain, “before I read those things, won’t you tell me--I should care more--I should like so much to know what _you_--I suppose I’ve no right to ask!”

He tried to make some show of decency about the matter, but in fact he had the heart to ask a dying man his opinion, in that literary passion which spares nothing, and is as protean as love itself in its disguises.

“I suppose,” she answered, “that I had no right to read it; I wasn’t asked to do it.”

“Oh, yes, you had. I’m very glad you did.”

“The opinions about it were so different that I couldn’t help looking at it, and then--I kept on,” she said.

“Were they so _very_ different?” he asked, trembling with his author’s sensitiveness, while the implication of praise in her confession worked like a frenzied hope in his brain. “And you kept on? Then it interested you?”

She did not answer this question, but said: “None of them thought just alike about it. But you’ll see them”--

“No, no! Tell me what you thought of it yourself! Was there some part that seemed better than the rest?”

She hesitated. “No, I would rather not say. I oughtn’t to have told you I had read it.”

“You didn’t like it!”

“Yes; I did like parts of it. But I musn’t say any more.”

“But what parts?” he pleaded.

“You mustn’t ask me. The readers’ opinions”--

“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely. “What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd! But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic? _Romeo and Juliet_ is melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve quite lost the sense of it. I don’t believe I can make head or tail of those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you thought of it yourself.”

“But I have no right to do that. It would be interfering with other people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded.

“I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your pardon. Good-night!”

He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him, and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less. Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different. Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest through a prevailing fad. A fifth touched upon the obvious imitation of Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.

Ray resented, with a keen sense of personal affront, these criticisms in severalty, but their combined effect was utter humiliation, though they were less true taken together than they were separately. At the bottom of his sore and angry heart he could not deny their truth, and yet he knew that there was something in his book which none of them had taken account of, and that this was its life, which had come out of his own. He was aware of all those crude and awkward and affected things, but he believed there was something, too, that went with them, and that had not been in fiction before.

It was this something which he hoped that girl had felt in his story, and which he was trying to get her to own to him before he looked at the opinions. They confounded and distracted him beyond his foreboding even, and it was an added anguish to keep wondering, as he did all night, whether she had really found anything more in the novel than his critics had. As he turned from side to side and beat his pillow into this shape and that, he reconstructed the story after one critic’s suggestion, and then after another’s; but the material only grew more defiant and impossible; if it could not keep the shape it had, it would take no other. That was plain; and the only thing to be done was to throw it away, and write something else; for it was not reasonable to suppose that Mr. Brandreth would think of bringing the book out in the teeth of all these adverse critics. But now he had no heart to think of anything else, although he was always thinking of something else, while there was hope of getting this published. His career as an author was at an end; he must look about for some sort of newspaper work; he ought to be very glad if he could get something to do as a space man.

XXI.

He rose, after a late nap following his night-long vigils, with despair in his soul. He believed it was despair, and so it was to all intents and purposes. But, when he had bathed, he seemed to have washed a little of his despair away; when he had dressed, he felt hungry, and he ate his breakfast with rather more than his usual appetite.

The reaction was merely physical, and his gloom settled round him again when he went back to his attic and saw his manuscript and those deadly opinions. He had not the heart to go out anywhere, and he cowered alone in his room. If he could only get the light of some other mind on the facts he might grapple with them; but without this he was limp and helpless. Now he knew, in spite of all his pretences to the contrary, in spite of the warnings and cautions he had given himself, that he had not only hoped, but had expected, that his story would be found good enough to publish. Yet none of these readers--even those who found some meritorious traits in it--had apparently dreamed of recommending it for publication. It was no wonder that Miss Hughes had been so unwilling to tell him what she thought of it; that she had urged him so strongly to read the opinions first. What a fool she must have thought him!

There was no one else he could appeal to, unless it was old Kane. He did not know where Kane lived, even if he could have gathered the courage to go to him in his extremity; and he bet himself that Kane would not repeat his last Sunday’s visit. The time for any reasonable hope of losing passed, and then to his great joy he lost. There came a hesitating step outside his door, as if some one were in doubt where to knock, and then a tap at it.

Ray flung it open, and at sight of Kane the tears came into his eyes, and he could not speak.

“Why, my dear friend!” cried Kane, “what is the matter?”

Ray kept silent till he could say coldly, “Nothing. It’s all over.”

Kane stepped into the room, and took off his hat. “If you haven’t been rejected by the object of your affections, you have had the manuscript of your novel declined. These are the only things that really bring annihilation. I think the second is worse. A man is never so absolutely and solely in love with one woman but he knows some other who is potentially lovable; that is the wise provision of Nature. But while a man has a manuscript at a publisher’s, it is the only manuscript in the world. You can readily work out the comparison. I hope you have merely been disappointed in love, my dear boy.”

Ray smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid it’s worse.”

“Then Chapley & Co. have declined your novel definitely?”

“Not in set terms; or not yet. But their readers have all reported against it, and I’ve passed the night in reading their opinions. I’ve got them by heart. Would you like to hear me repeat them?” he demanded, with a fierce self-scorn.

Kane looked at him compassionately. “Heaven forbid! I could repeat them, I dare say, as accurately as you; the opinions of readers do not vary much, and I have had many novels declined.”

“Have you?” Ray faltered with compunction for his arrogation of all such suffering to himself.

“Yes. That was one reason why I began to write _Hard Sayings_. But if you will let me offer you another leaf from my experience, I will suggest that there are many chances for reprieve and even pardon after the readers have condemned your novel. I once had a novel accepted--the only novel I ever had accepted--after all the publisher’s readers had pronounced against it.”

“Had you?” Ray came tremulously back at him.

“Yes,” sighed Kane. “That is why Chapley is so fond of me; he has forgiven me a deadly injury.” He paused to let his words carry Ray down again, and then he asked, with a nod toward the bed where the young fellow had flung his manuscript and the readers’ opinions, “Might I?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Ray from his depths; and Kane took up the opinions and began to run them over.

“Yes, they have a strangely familiar effect; they are like echoes from my own past.” He laid them down again. “Do you think they are right?”

“Yes. Perfectly! That is”--

“Oh! _That is._ There is hope, I see.”

“How, hope?” Ray retorted. “Does my differing with them make any difference as to the outcome?”

“For the book, no, perhaps; for you, yes, decidedly. It makes all the difference between being stunned and being killed. It is not pleasant to be stunned, but it is not for such a long time as being killed. What is your story about?”

It astonished Ray himself to find how much this question revived his faith and courage. His undying interest in the thing, by and for itself, as indestructible as a mother’s love, revived, and he gave Kane the outline of his novel. Then he filled this in, and he did not stop till he had read some of the best passages. He suddenly tossed his manuscript from him. “What a fool I am!”

Kane gave his soft, thick laugh, shutting his eyes, and showing his small white teeth, still beautifully sound. “Oh, no! Oh, no! I have read worse things than that! I have written worse than that. Come, come! Here is nothing to beat the breast for. I doubt if Chapley’s will take it, in defiance of their readers; their experience with me has rendered that very improbable. But they are not the only publishers in New York, or Philadelphia even; I’m told they have very eager ones in Chicago. Why shouldn’t the _roman psychologique_, if that’s the next thing, as Mr. Brandreth believes, get on its legs at Chicago, and walk East?”

“I wonder,” Ray said, rising aimlessly from his chair, “whether it would do to call on Mr. Brandreth to-day? This suspense--Do you know whether he is very religious?”

“How should I know such a thing of my fellow-man in New York? I don’t know it even of myself. At times I am very religious, and at times, not. But Mr. Brandreth is rather a formal little man, and a business interview on Sunday, with an agonized author, might not seem exactly decorous to him.”

“I got the impression he wasn’t very stiff. But it wouldn’t do,” said Ray, before Kane had rounded his neat period. “What an ass I am!”

“We are all asses,” Kane sighed. “It is the great bond of human brotherhood. When did you get these verdicts?”

“Oh, Mr. Brandreth told me Miss Hughes had taken them home with her yesterday, and I couldn’t rest till I had his leave to go and get them of her.”

“Exactly. If we know there is possible unhappiness in store for us, we don’t wait for it; we make haste and look it up, and embrace it. And how did my dear old friend Hughes, if you saw him, impress you this time?”

“I saw him, and I still prefer him to _his_ friends,” said Ray.

“Naturally. There are not many people, even in a planet so overpeopled as this, who are the peers of David Hughes. He goes far to make me respect my species. Of course he is ridiculous. A man so hopeful as Hughes is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the human proposition. How can there reasonably be hope in a world where poverty and death are? To be sure, Hughes proposes to eliminate poverty and explain death. You know he thinks--he really believes, I suppose--that if he could once get his millenium going, and everybody so blessed in this life that the absolute knowledge of heavenly conditions in another would not tempt us to suicide, then the terror and the mystery of death would be taken away, and the race would be trusted with its benificent meaning. It’s rather a pretty notion.”

Ray, with his narrow experience, would not have been able to grasp it fully. Now he broke out without the least relevancy to it, “I wonder how it would do to remodel my story so far as to transfer the scene to New York? It might be more popular.” The criticism that one of those readers had made on the helplessness of his fidelity to simple rustic conditions had suddenly begun to gall him afresh. “I beg your pardon. I _didn’t_ notice what you were saying! I can’t get my mind off that miserable thing!”

Kane laughed. “Oh, don’t apologize. I know how it is. Perhaps a change of scene _would_ be good; it’s often advised, you know.” He laughed again, and Ray with him, ruefully, and now he rose.

“Oh, must you go?” Ray entreated.

“Yes. You are best alone; when we are in pain we _are_, alone, anyway. If misery loves company, company certainly does not love misery. I can stand my own troubles, but not other people’s. Good-by! We will meet again when you are happier.”

XXII.

Mr. Brandreth tried hard to escape from the logic of his readers’ opinions. In the light of his friendly optimism they took almost a favorable cast. He argued that there was nothing absolutely damnatory in those verdicts, that they all more or less tacitly embodied a recommendation to mercy. So far his personal kindliness carried him, but beyond this point business put up her barrier. He did not propose to take the book in spite of his readers; he said he would see; and after having seen for a week longer, he returned the MS. with a letter assuring Ray of his regret, and saying that if he could modify the story according to the suggestions of their readers, Chapley & Co. would be pleased to examine it again.

Ray had really expected some such answer as this, though he hoped against reason for something different. In view of it he had spent the week mentally recasting the story in this form and in that; sometimes it yielded to his efforts in one way or another; when the manuscript came into his hands again, he saw that it was immutably fixed in the terms he had given it, and that it must remain essentially what it was, in spite of any external travesty.

He offered Mr. Brandreth his thanks and his excuses for not trying to make any change in it until he had first offered it as it was to other publishers. He asked if it would shut him out of Chapley & Co.’s grace if he were refused elsewhere, and received an answer of the most flattering cordiality to the effect that their desire to see the work in another shape was quite unconditioned. Mr. Brandreth seemed to have put a great deal of heart in this answer; it was most affectionately expressed; it closed with the wish that he might soon see Ray at his house again.

Ray could not have believed, but for the experience which came to him, that there could be so many reasons for declining to publish any one book as the different publishers now gave him. For the most part they deprecated the notion of even looking at it. The book-trade had never been so prostrate before; events of the most unexpected nature had conspired to reduce it to a really desperate condition. The unsettled state of Europe had a good deal to do with it; the succession of bad seasons at the West affected it most distinctly. The approach of a Presidential year was unfavorable to this sensitive traffic. Above all, the suspense created by the lingering and doubtful fate of the international copyright bill was playing havoc with it; people did not know what course to take; it was impossible to plan any kind of enterprise, or to risk any sort of project. Men who had been quite buoyant in regard to the bill seemed carried down to the lowest level of doubt as to its fate by the fact that Ray had a novel to offer them; they could see no hope for American fiction, if that English trash was destined to flood the market indefinitely. They sympathized with him, but they said they were all in the same boat, and that the only thing was to bring all the pressure each could to bear upon Congress. The sum of their counsel and condolence came to the effect in Ray’s mind that his best hope was to get _A Modern Romeo_ printed by Congress as a Public Document and franked by the Senators and Representatives to their constituents. He found a melancholy amusement in noting the change in the mood of those who used to meet him cheerfully and carelessly as the correspondent of a newspaper, and now found themselves confronted with an author, and felt his manuscript at their throats. Some tried to joke; some became helplessly serious; some sought to temporize.

Those whose circumstances and engagements forbade them even to look at his novel were the easiest to bear with. They did not question the quality or character of his work; they had no doubt of its excellence, and they had perfect faith in its success; but simply their hands were so full they could not touch it. The other sort, when they consented to examine the story, kept it so long that Ray could not help forming false hopes of the outcome; or else they returned it with a precipitation that mortified his pride, and made him sceptical of their having looked into it at all. He did not experience unconditional rejection everywhere. In some cases the readers proposed radical and impossible changes, as Chapley & Co.’s readers had done. In one instance they so far recommended it that the publisher was willing to lend his imprint and manage the book for the per cent usually paid to authors, if Ray would meet all the expenses. There was an enthusiast who even went so far as to propose that he would publish it if Ray would pay the cost of the electrotype plates. He appeared to think this a handsome offer, and Ray in fact found it so much better than nothing that he went into some serious estimates upon it. He called in the help of old Kane, who was an expert in the matter of electrotyping, and was able from his sad experience to give him the exact figures. They found that _A New Romeo_ would make some four hundred and thirty or forty pages, and that at the lowest price the plates would cost more than three hundred dollars. The figure made Ray gasp; the mere thought of it impoverished him. His expenses had already eaten a hundred dollars into his savings beyond the five dollars a week he had from the _Midland Echo_ for his letters. If he paid out this sum for his plates, he should now have some ninety dollars left.

“But then,” said Kane, arching his eyebrows, “the trifling sum of three hundred dollars, risked upon so safe a venture as _A New Romeo_, will probably result in riches beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“Yes: or it may result in total loss,” Ray returned.

“It is a risk. But what was it you have been asking all these other people to do? One of them turns and asks you to share the risk with him; he asks you to risk less than half on a book that you have written yourself, and he will risk the other half. What just ground have you for refusing his generous offer?”

“It isn’t my business to publish books; it’s my business to write them,” said Ray, coldly.

“Ah-h-h! Very true! That is a solid position. Then all you have to do to make it quite impregnable is to write such books that other men will be eager to take all the risks of publishing them. It appears that in the present case you omitted to do that.” Kane watched Ray’s face with whimsical enjoyment. “I was afraid you were putting your reluctance upon the moral ground, and that you were refusing to bet on your book because you thought it wrong to bet.”

“I’m afraid,” said Ray, dejectedly, “that the moral question didn’t enter with me. If people thought it wrong to make bets of that kind, it seems to me that all business would come to a standstill.”

“‘Sh!” said Kane, putting his finger to his lip, and glancing round with burlesque alarm. “This is open incivism. It is accusing the whole framework of commercial civilization. Go on; it’s delightful to hear you; but don’t let any one _over_hear you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ray, with sullen resentment, “about incivism. I’m saying what everybody knows.”

“Ah! But what everybody _knows_ is just what nobody _says_. If people said what they knew, society would tumble down like a house of cards.”

Ray was silent, far withdrawn from these generalities into his personal question.

Kane asked compassionately, “Then you think you can’t venture--risk--chance it? Excuse me! I was trying to find a euphemism for the action, but there seems none!”

“No; I daren’t do it! The risk is too great.”