Part 11

“That seems to be the consensus of the book trade concerning it. Perhaps you are right. _Would_ you mind,” asked Kane with all his sweet politeness, “letting me take your manuscript home, and go over it carefully?”

“_Let_ you!” Ray began in a rapture of gratitude, but Kane stopped him.

“No, no! Don’t expect anything! _Don’t_ form any hopes. Simply suppose me to be reading it as a lover of high-class fiction, with no ulterior view whatever. I am really the feeblest of conies, and I have not even the poor advantage of having my habitation in the rocks. Good-by! Good-day! Don’t try to stop me with civilities! Heaven knows how far my noble purpose will hold if it is weakened by any manner of delay.”

Ray lived a day longer in the flimsiest air-castles that ever the vagrant winds blew through. In the evening Kane came back with his story.

“Well, my dear young friend, you have certainly produced the despair of criticism in this extraordinary fiction of yours. I don’t wonder all the readers have been of so many minds about it. I only wonder that any one man could be of any one mind about it long enough to get himself down on paper. In some respects it is the very worst thing I ever saw, and yet--and yet--it interested me, it held me to the end. I will make a confession; I will tell you the truth. I took the thing home, hoping to find justification in it for approaching a poor friend of mine who is in the publishing line, and making him believe that his interest lay in publishing it. But I could not bring myself to so simple an act of bad faith. I found I should have to say to my friend, ‘Here is a novel which might make your everlasting fortune, but most of the chances are against it. There are twenty chances that it will fail to one that it will succeed; just the average of failure and success in business life. You had better take it.’ Of course he would not take it, because he could not afford to add a special risk to the general business risk. You see?”

“I see,” said Ray, but without the delight that a case so beautifully reasoned should bring to the logical mind. At the bottom of his heart, though he made such an outward show of fairness and impersonality, he was simply and selfishly emotional about his book. He could not enter into the humor of Kane’s dramatization of the case; he tacitly accused him of inconsistency, and possibly of envy and jealousy. It began to be as if it were Kane alone who was keeping his book from its chance with the public. This conception, which certainly appeared perverse to Ray at times, was at others entirely in harmony with one of several theories of the man. He had chilled Ray more than once by the cold cynicism of his opinions concerning mankind at large; and now Ray asked himself why Kane’s cynicism should not characterize his behavior towards him, too. Such a man would find a delight in studying him in his defeat, and turning his misery into phrases and aphorisms.

He was confirmed in his notion of Kane’s heartlessness by the strange behavior of Mr. Brandreth, who sent for his manuscript one morning, asking if he might keep it a few days, and then returned it the same day, with what Ray thought an insufficient explanation of the transaction. He proudly suffered a week under its inadequacy, and then he went to Mr. Brandreth, and asked him just what the affair meant; it seemed to him that he had a right to know.

Mr. Brandreth laughed in rather a shame-faced way. “I may as well make a clean breast of it. As I told you when we first met, I’ve been wanting to publish a novel for some time; and although I haven’t read yours, the plot attracted me, and I thought I would give it another chance--the best chance I could. I wanted to show it to a friend of yours--I suppose I may say friend, at least it was somebody that I thought would be prejudiced more in favor of it than against it; and I had made up my mind that if the person approved of it I would read it too, and if we agreed about it, I would get Mr. Chapley to risk it. But--I found that the person had read it.”

“And didn’t like it.”

“I can’t say that, exactly.”

“If it comes to that,” said Ray, with a bitter smile, “it doesn’t matter about the precise terms.” He could not speak for a moment; then he swallowed the choking lump in his throat, and offered Brandreth his hand. “Thank _you_, Mr. Brandreth! I’m sure _you’re_ my friend; and I sha’n’t forget your kindness.”

XXIII.

The disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted with that part of his poem, and cut it out.

As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.

When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.

The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.

“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have forgiven me by eating salt with us?”

“There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray,” Mrs. Denton called gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.

There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father’s table, and he thought it good enough, even after several years’ sophistication in cities.

“There was to have been steak,” Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look at her husband, “but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn’t want any steak.”

Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and he asked vaguely, “What did he see?”

“Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their rent. I think that after this, when Ansel won’t come home by the Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some good from the exercise. He won’t see families set out on the sidewalk in Fifth Avenue.”

Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and Denton said: “The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better. If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves”--

“Oh, I don’t call salt and potatoes luxury,” exactly, said his wife.

Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his sadness. “I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back rent,” he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent again.

Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. “I recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his blessing.”

“Did he look as if he had got rich begging?” Denton asked.

“No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working,” Ray answered, neatly.

Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.

“You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”

Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery. “Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”

“Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”

“No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with an imperfect hold of her irony.

“There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”

“I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. “I wish they would swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show him what his wealth was based on.”

“It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality. The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not take the chance of suffering for himself and his family by relieving the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”

“In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no chance of suffering.”

“No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”

He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript, father,” and brought it to him.

The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.

“Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.

“Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if there was anything to go back to.”

Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent, and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him. Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions. What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”

“Then I don’t see why he objects to the new processes,” said Ray, with the heartlessness which so easily passes for wit. Peace looked at him with grave surprise.

Mrs. Denton laughed over the cat which had got up in her lap. “That’s what I tell him. But it doesn’t satisfy him.”

“You know,” said the younger sister, with a reproach in her tone, which brought Ray sensibly under condemnation, too, “that he means that art must be free before it can be true, and that there can be no freedom where there is the fear of want.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, turning her head for a new effect of the sleeping cat, “there was no fear of want in the Family; but there wasn’t much art, either.”

Ray was tempted to laugh, but he wanted above all to read his poem, and to lead up to it without delay, and he denied himself the pleasure of a giggle with Mrs. Denton. “I suppose,” he said, “the experiment of emancipation is tried on too small a scale in a community.”

“That is what father thinks,” said Peace. “That is why he wants the whole world to be free.”

“Yes,” said Ray, aware of a relenting in her towards himself; and he added, with apparent inconsequence: “Perhaps it would help forward the time for it if every artist could express his feeling about it, or represent it somehow.”

“I don’t see exactly how they could in a picture or a statue,” said Mrs. Denton.

“No,” Ray assented from the blind alley where he had unexpectedly brought up. He broke desperately from it, and said, more toward Peace than toward her sister, “I have been trying to turn my own little disappointment into poetry. You know,” he added, “that Chapley & Co. have declined my book?”

“Yes,” she admitted, with a kind of shyness.

“I wonder,” and here Ray took the manuscript out of his pocket, “whether you would let me read you some passages of my poem.”

Mrs. Denton assented eagerly, and Peace less eagerly, but with an interest that was enough for him. Before he began to read, Mrs. Denton said a number of things that seemed suddenly to have accumulated in her mind, mostly irrelevant; she excused herself for leaving the room, and begged Ray to wait till she came back. Several times during the reading she escaped and returned; the poet finished in one of her absences.

XXIV.

“You see,” Ray said, “it’s merely a fragment.” He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

“Of course,” the girl answered, with a sigh. “Isn’t disappointment always fragmentary?” she asked, sadly.

“How do you mean?”

“Why, happiness is like something complete; and disappointment like something broken off, to me. A story that ends well seems rounded; and one that ends badly leaves you waiting, as you do just after some one dies.”

“Is that why you didn’t like my story?” Ray asked, imprudently. He added quickly, at an embarrassment which came into her face, “Oh, I didn’t mean to add to my offence! I came here partly to excuse it. I was too persistent the other night.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, I was. I had no right to an opinion from you. I knew it at the time, but I couldn’t help it. You were right to refuse. But you can tell me how my poem strikes you. It isn’t offered for publication!”

He hoped that she would praise some passages that he thought fine; but she began to speak of the motive, and he saw that she had not missed anything, that she had perfectly seized his intention. She talked to him of it as if it were the work of some one else, and he said impulsively, “If I had you to criticise my actions beforehand, I should not be so apt to make a fool of myself.”

Mrs. Denton came back. “I ran off toward the last. I didn’t want to be here when Peace began to criticise. She’s so severe.”

“She hasn’t been at all severe this time,” said Ray.

“I don’t see how she could be,” Mrs. Denton returned. “All that I heard was splendid.”

“It’s merely a fragment,” said Ray, with grave satisfaction in her flattery.

“You must finish it, and read us the rest of it.”

Ray looked at Peace, and something in her face made him say, “I shall never finish it; it isn’t worth it.”

“Did Peace say that?”

“No.”

Mrs. Denton laughed. “That’s just like Peace. She makes other people say the disagreeable things she thinks about them.”

“What a mysterious power!” said Ray. “Is it hypnotic suggestion?”

He spoke lightly toward Peace, but her sister answered: “Oh, we’re full of mysteries in this house. Did you know that my husband had a Voice?”

“A voice! Is a voice mysterious?”

“This one is. It’s an internal Voice. It tells him what to do.”

“Oh, like the demon of Socrates.”

“I _hope_ it isn’t a demon!” said Mrs. Denton.

“That depends upon what it tells him to do,” said Ray. “In Socrates’ day a familiar spirit could be a demon without being at all bad. How proud you must be to have a thing like that in the family!”

“I don’t know. It has its inconveniences, sometimes. When it tells him to do what we don’t want him to,” said Mrs. Denton.

“Oh, but think of the compensations!” Ray urged. “Why, it’s equal to a ghost.”

“I suppose it is a kind of ghost,” said Mrs. Denton, and Ray fancied she had the pride we all feel in any alliance, direct or indirect, with the supernatural. “Do you believe in dreams?” she asked abruptly.

“Bad ones, I do,” said Ray. “We always expect bad dreams and dark presentiments to come true, don’t we!”

“I don’t know. My husband does. He has a Dream as well as a Voice.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Ray; and he added: “I see. The Voice is the one he talks with in his sleep.”

The flippant suggestion amused Mrs. Denton; but a shadow of pain came over Peace’s face, that made Ray wish to get away from the mystery he had touched; she might be a believer in it, or ashamed of it.

“I wonder,” he added, “why we never expect our day-dreams to come true?”

“Perhaps because they’re never bad ones--because we know we’re just making them,” said Mrs. Denton.

“It must be that! But, do we always make them? Sometimes my day-dreams seem to make themselves, and they keep on doing it so long that they tire me to death. They’re perfect daymares.”

“How awful! The only way would be to go to sleep, if you wanted to get rid of them.”

“Yes; and that isn’t so easy as waking up. Anybody can wake up; a man can wake up to go to execution; but it takes a very happy man to go to sleep.”

The recognition of this fact reminded Ray that he was himself a very unhappy man; he had forgotten it for the time.

“He might go into society and get rid of them that way,” Mrs. Denton suggested, with an obliquity which he was too simply masculine to perceive. “I suppose you go into society a good deal, Mr. Ray?”

Peace made a little movement as of remonstrance, but she did not speak, and Ray answered willingly: “_I_ go into society? I have been inside of just one house--or flat--besides this, since I came to New York.”

“Why!” said Mrs. Denton.

She seemed to be going to say something more, but she stopped at a look from her sister, and left Ray free to so on or not, as he chose. He told them it was Mr. Brandreth’s flat he had been in; at some little hints of curiosity from Mrs. Denton, he described it to her.

“I have some letters from people in Midland, but I haven’t presented them yet,” he added at the end. “The Brandreths are all I know of society.”

“They’re much more than we know. Well, it seems like fairyland,” said Mrs. Denton, in amiable self-derision. “I used to think that was the way we should live when we left the Family. I suppose there are people in New York that would think it was like fairyland to live like us, and not all in one room. Ansel is always preaching that when I grumble.”

The cat sprang up into her lap, and she began to smooth its long flank, and turn her head from side to side, admiring its enjoyment.

“Well,” Ray said, “whatever we do, we are pretty sure to be sorry we didn’t do something else.”

He was going to lead up to his own disappointments by this commonplace, but Mrs. Denton interposed.

“Oh, I’m not sorry we left the Family, if that’s what you mean. There’s some chance, here, and there everything went by rule; you had your share of the work, and you knew just what you had to expect every day. I used to say I wished something _wrong_ would happen, just so as to have _something_ happen. I believe it was more than half that that got father out, too,” she said, with a look at her sister.

“I thought,” said Ray, “but perhaps I didn’t understand him, that your father wanted to make the world over on the image of your community.”

“I guess he wanted to have the fun of chancing it, too,” said Mrs. Denton. “Of course he wants to make the world over, but he has a pretty good time as it is; and I’m glad of all I did and said to get him into it. He had no chance to bring his ideas to bear on it in the Family.”

“Then it was you who got him out of the community,” said Ray.

“I did my best,” said Mrs. Denton. “But I can’t say I did it, altogether.”

“Did you help?” he asked Peace.

“I wished father to do what he thought was right. He had been doubtful about the life there for a good while--whether it was really doing anything for humanity.”

She used the word with no sense of cant in it; Ray could perceive that.

“And do you ever wish you were back in the Family?”

Mrs. Denton called out joyously: “Why, there is no Family to be back in, I’m thankful to say! Didn’t you know that?”

“I forgot.” Ray smiled, as he pursued, “Well, if there was one to be back in, would you like to be there, Miss Hughes?”

“I can’t tell,” she answered, with a trouble in her voice. “When I’m not feeling very strong or well, I should. And when I see so many people struggling so hard here, and failing after all they do, I wish they could be where there was no failure, and no danger of it. In the Family we were safe, and we hadn’t any care.”

“We hadn’t any choice, either,” said her sister.

“What choice has a man who doesn’t know where the next day’s work is coming from?”

Ray looked round to find that Denton had entered behind them from the room where he had been, and was sitting beside the window apparently listening to their talk. There was something uncanny in the fact of his unknown presence, though neither of the sisters seemed to feel it.