Part 21
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 Modern 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 Modern 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 _Modern 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 Modern 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 Modern 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?”
“Yes; I go there every week or so.”
“How are they getting on?”
“Very well, I believe.” Ray mused a moment, and then he said: “If it were not contrary to all our preconceptions of a sort of duty in people who have been through what they have been through, I should say they were both happier than I ever saw them before. I don’t think Mrs. Denton cared a great deal for her children or husband, but in her father’s last days he wouldn’t have anybody else about him. She strikes one like a person who would get married again.”
Mr. Brandreth listened with the air of one trying to feel shocked; but he smiled.
“I don’t blame her,” Ray continued. “Perhaps old Kane’s habit of not blaming people is infectious. She once accounted for herself on the ground that she didn’t make herself; I suppose it might be rather dangerous ground if people began to take it generally. But Miss Hughes did care for those poor little souls and for that wretched creature, and now the care’s gone, and the relief has come. They both miss their father; but he was doomed; he _had_ to die; and besides, his fatherhood struck me as being rather thin, at times, from having been spread out over a community so long. I can’t express it exactly, but it seems to me that the children of a man who is trying to bring about a millennium of any kind do not have a good time. Still, I suppose we must have the millenniums.”
“You said that just like old Kane,” Mr. Brandreth observed.
“Did I? I just owned he was infectious. If I’ve caught his habit of mind, I dare say I’ve caught his accent. I don’t particularly admire either. But what I mean is that Miss Hughes and her sister are getting on very comfortably and sweetly. Their place is as homelike as any I know in New York.”
“As soon as we get back in the fall, Mrs. Brandreth is going to call on them. Now that Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are out of the way, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t show them some attention. Miss Hughes, at least, is a perfect lady. I’m going to see that she doesn’t overwork; the success of _A Modern Romeo_ has killed us nearly all; I’m going to give her a three weeks’ vacation toward the end of August.”
Ray called upon Peace one evening in the beginning of her vacation, and found her with the manuscript of a book before her; Mrs. Denton was sitting with the Simpsons on their front steps, and sent him on up to Peace when he declined to join her there.
He said, “I supposed I should find you reading up the Adirondack guide-books, or trying to decide between Newport and Saratoga. I don’t see how your outing differs very much from your inning.”
“This was only a book I brought home because I had got interested in it,” the girl explained in self-defence. “We’re not going away anywhere.”
“I think I would stay myself,” said Ray, “if it were not for wanting to see my family. My vacation begins to-morrow.”
“Does it?”
“Yes; and I should be very willing to spend my fortnight excursioning around New York. But I’m off at once to-night; I came in to say good-by. I hope you’ll miss me.”
“We shall miss you very much,” she said; and she added, “I suppose most of our fashionable friends have gone out of town.”
“Have they?”
“I should think you would know. We had them at second-hand from you.”
“Oh! Those?” said Ray. “Yes. They’re gone, and I’m going. I hate to leave you behind. Have you any message for the country?”
“Only my love.” She faced the manuscript down on the table before her, and rocked softly to and fro a moment. “It does make me a little homesick to think of it,” she said, with touching patience.
He felt the forlornness in her accent, and a sense of her isolation possessed him. When Mrs. Denton should marry again, Peace would be alone in the world. He looked at her, and she seemed very little and slight, to make her way single-handed.
“Peace!” he said, and the intensity of his voice startled him. “There is something I wanted to say to you--to ask you,” and he was aware of her listening as intensely as he spoke, though no change of attitude or demeanor betrayed the fact; he had to go on in a lighter strain if he went on at all. “You know, I suppose, what a rich man I am going to be when I get the copyright on my book. It’s almost incredible, but I’m going to be worth five or six thousand dollars; to be as rich as most millionaires. Well--I asked you to let me be your friend once, because I didn’t think a man who was turning out a failure had the right to ask to be more. Or, no! That _isn’t_ it!” he broke off, shocked by the false ring of his words. “I don’t know how to say it. I was in love once--very much in love; the kind of love that I’ve put into my book; and this--this worship that I have for you, for I do worship you!--it isn’t the same, Peace. It’s everything that honors you, and once it _was_ like that; but now I’m not sure. But I couldn’t go away without offering you my worship, for you to accept for all our lives; or reject, if it wasn’t enough. Do you understand?”
“I do understand,” the girl returned, and she nervously pressed the hand which she allowed to gather hers into it.
“I couldn’t leave you,” he went on, “without telling you that there is no one in the world that I honor so much as you. I had it in my heart to say this long ago; but it seems such a strange thing to stop with. If I didn’t think you so wise and so good, I don’t believe I could say it to you. I know that now whatever you decide will be right, and the best for us both. I couldn’t bear to have you suppose I would keep coming to see you without--I would have told you this long ago, but I always expected to tell you more. But I’m twenty-six now, and perhaps I shall never feel in that old way again. I _know_ our lives would be united in the highest things; and you would save me from living for myself alone. What do you say, Peace?”
He waited for her to break the silence which he did not know how to interpret. At last she said “No!” and she drew back from him and took her hand away. “It wouldn’t be right. I shouldn’t be afraid to trust you”----
“Then why”----
“For I know how faithful you are. But I’m afraid--I _know_--I don’t love you! And without that it would be a sacrilege. That isn’t enough of itself, but everything else would be nothing without it.” As if she felt the wound her words must have dealt to his self-love, she hurried on: “I did love you once. Yes! I did. And when Mr. Brandreth wanted me to read your book that time, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid of myself. But afterwards it--went.”
“Was it my fault?” Ray asked.
“It wasn’t any one’s fault,” said the girl. “If I had not been so unhappy, it might have been different.”
“Oh, Peace!”
“But I had no heart for it. And now my life must go on just as it is. I have thought it all out. I thought that some time you might tell me--what you have--or different--and I tried to think what I ought to do. I shall never care for any one else; I shall never get married. Don’t think I shall be unhappy! I can take good care of myself, and Jenny and I will not be lonesome together. Even if we don’t always live together--still, I can always make myself a home. I’m not afraid to be an old maid. There is work in the world for me to do, and I can do it. Is it so strange I should be saying this?”
“No, no. It’s right.”
“I suppose that most of the girls you know wouldn’t do it. But I have been brought up differently. In the Family they did not think that marriage was always the best thing; and when I saw how Jenny and Ansel--I don’t mean that it would ever have been like that! But I don’t wish you to think that life will be hard or unhappy for me. And you--you will find somebody that you can feel towards as you did towards that first girl.”
“Never! I shall never care for any one again!” he cried. At the bottom of his heart there was a relief which he tried to ignore, though he could not deny himself a sense of the unique literary value of the situation. It was from a consciousness of this relief that he asked, “And what do you think of me, Peace? Do you blame me?”
“Blame you? How? For my having changed?”
“I feel to blame,” said the young man. “How shall we do, now? Shall I come to see you when I return?”
“Yes. But we won’t speak of this again.”
“Shall you tell Mrs. Denton?”
“Of course.”
“She will blame me.”
“She will blame _me_,” said Peace. “But--I shall not be troubled, and you mustn’t,” she said, and she lightly touched him. “This is just as I wish it to be. I’ve been afraid that if this ever happened, I shouldn’t have the courage to tell you what I have. But you helped me, and I am so glad you did! I was afraid you would say something that would blind me, and keep me from going on in the right way; but now--Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Ray, vaguely. “May I--dream of you, Peace?”
“If you’ll stop at daybreak.”
“Ah, then I shall begin to think of you.”
XLV.
They had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!
The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.