Part 5

It was all very different from the dignified housing of his life at Midland, where less than the money he paid here got him a stately parlor, with a little chamber out of it, at the first boarding-house in the place. But still he would not have been ashamed to have any one from Midland see him in his present quarters. They were proper to New York in that cosmopolitan phase which he had most desired to see. He tried writing at the little table, and found it very convenient. He forced himself, just for moral effect, and to show himself that he was master of all his moods, to finish his letter to the _Echo_, and he pleased himself very well with it. He made it light and lively, and yet contrived to give it certain touches of poetry and to throw in bits of description which he fancied had caught something of the thrill and sparkle of the air, and imparted some sense of such a day as he felt it to be. He fancied different friends turning to the letter the first thing in the paper; and in the fond remembrance of the kindness he had left behind there, he became a little homesick.

XI.

Ray would have liked to go again that day, and give Mr. Brandreth his new address in person; but he was afraid it would seem too eager, and would have a bad effect on the fortunes of his book. He mastered himself so far that even the next day he did not go, but sent it in a note. Then he was sorry he had done this, for it might look a little too indifferent; that is, he feigned that it might have this effect; but what he really regretted was that it cut him off from going to see Mr. Brandreth as soon as he would have liked. It would be absurd to run to him directly after writing. He languished several days in the heroic resolution not to go near Chapley & Co. until a proper time had passed; then he took to walking up and down Broadway, remote from their place at first, and afterwards nearer, till it came to his pacing slowly past their door, and stopping at their window, in the hope that one or other of the partners would happen upon him in some of their comings or goings. But they never did, and he had a faint, heart-sick feeling of disappointment, such as he used to have when he hung about the premises of his first love in much the same fashion and to much the same effect.

He cajoled himself by feigning interviews, now with Mr. Chapley and now with Mr. Brandreth; the publishers accepted his manuscript with transport, and offered him incredible terms. The good old man’s voice shook with emotion in hailing Ray as the heir of Hawthorne; Mr. Brandreth had him up to dinner, and presented him to his wife and baby; he named the baby for them jointly. As nothing of this kind really happened, Ray’s time passed rather forlornly. Without being the richer for it, he won the bets he made himself, every morning, that he should not get a letter that day from Chapley & Co., asking to see him at once, or from Mr. Brandreth hoping for the pleasure of his company upon this social occasion or that. He found that he had built some hopes upon Mr. Brandreth’s hospitable regrets; and as he did not know how long it must be after a happiness of the kind Mrs. Brandreth had conferred upon her husband before her house could be set in order for company, he was perhaps too impatient. But he did not suffer himself to be censorious; he was duly grateful to Mr. Brandreth for his regrets; he had not expected them; but for them he would not have expected anything.

He did what he could to pass the time by visiting other publishers with Mr. Brandreth’s card. He perceived sometimes, or fancied that he perceived, a shadow of anxiety in the gentlemen who received him so kindly, but it vanished, if it ever existed, when he put himself frankly on the journalistic ground, and satisfied them that he had no manuscript lurking about him. Then he found some of them willing to drop into chat about the trade, and try to forecast its nearer future, if not to philosophize its conditions. They appeared to think these were all right; and it did not strike Ray as amiss that a work of literary art should be regarded simply as a merchantable or unmerchantable commodity, or as a pawn in a game, a counter that stood for a certain money value, a risk which the player took, a wager that he made.

“You know it’s really that,” one publisher explained to Ray. “_No_ one can tell whether a book will succeed or not; no one knows what makes a book succeed. We have published things that I’ve liked and respected thoroughly, and that I’ve taken a personal pride and pleasure in pushing. They’ve been well received and intelligently praised by the best critics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and cultivated people have talked about them everywhere; and they haven’t sold fifteen hundred copies. Then we’ve tried trash--decent trash, of course; we always remember the cheek of the Young Person--and we’ve all believed that we had something that would hit the popular mood, and would leap into the tens of thousands; and it’s dropped dead from the press. Other works of art and other pieces of trash succeed for no better reason than some fail. You can’t tell anything about it. If I were to trust my own observation, I should say it was _luck_, pure and simple, and mostly bad luck. Ten books fail, and twenty books barely pay, where one succeeds. Nobody can say why. Can’t I send you some of our new books?” He had a number of them on a table near him, and he talked them over with Ray, while a clerk did them up; and he would not let Ray trouble himself to carry them away with him. They were everywhere lavish of their publications with him, and he had so many new books and advance sheets given him that if he had been going to write his letters for the _Echo_ about literature alone, he would have had material for many weeks ahead.

The letters he got at this time were some from home: a very sweet one from his mother, fondly conjecturing and questioning about his comfort in New York, and cautioning him not to take cold; a serious one from his father, advising him to try each week to put by something for a rainy day. There was also a letter from Sanderson, gay with news of all the goings on in Midland, and hilariously regretful of his absence. Sanderson did not say anything about coming to New York to seek his fortune, and the effect of his news was to leave Ray pining for the society of women, which had always been the sweetest thing in life to him, and next to literature the dearest. If he could have had immediate literary success, the excitement of it might have made him forget the privilege he had enjoyed at Midland of going every evening to call on some lovely young girl, and of staying as long as he liked. What made him feel still more lonesome and dropped out was Sanderson’s telling of several engagements among the girls they knew in Midland; it appeared to him that he only was destined to go loveless and mateless through life.

There were women enough in his hotel, but after the first interest of their strangeness, and the romantic effect of hearing them speak in their foreign tongues as if they were at home in them, he could not imagine a farther interest in those opaque Southern blondes, who spoke French, or the brunettes with purple-ringed vast eyes, who coughed out their Spanish gutturals like squirrels. He was appointed a table for his meals in a dining-room that seemed to be reserved for its inmates, as distinguished from the frequenters of the restaurant, who looked as if they were all Americans; and he was served by a shining black waiter weirdly ignorant of English. He gazed wistfully across into the restaurant at times, and had half a mind to ask if he might not eat there; but he liked the glances of curiosity and perhaps envy which its frequenters now and then cast at him in the hotel dining-room. There were no young ladies among them, that he ever saw, but sometimes there were young men whom he thought he would have liked to talk with. Some of them came in company, and at dinner they sat long, discussing matters which he could overhear by snatches were literary and artistic matters. They always came late, and rarely sat down before seven, when Ray was finishing his coffee. One night these comrades came later than usual and in unusual force, and took a large table set somewhat apart from the rest in the bay of a deep window which had once looked out into the little garden of the dwelling that the hotel had once been. They sat down, with a babble of questions and answers, as of people who had not all met for some time, and devoured the little radishes and olives and anchovies, with which the table had been prefatorily furnished, in apparent patience till all the places but the head of the table had been taken; then they began to complain and to threaten at the delay of the dinner. Ray was not aware just how a furious controversy suddenly began to rage between two of them. As nearly as he could make out, amidst the rapid thrust and parry of the principals, and the irregular lunges of this one or that of the company which gave it the character of a free fight, it turned upon a point of æsthetics, where the question was whether the moral aspect ought or ought not to be sought in it. In the heat of the debate the chiefs of the discussion talked both at once, interrupted each other, tried which should clamor loudest and fastest, and then suddenly the whole uproar fell to silence. The two parties casually discovered that they were of exactly the same mind, but each had supposed the other thought differently. Some one came in during the lull that followed, and took the seat at the head of the table.

It was Mr. Kane, and Ray’s heart leaped with the hope that he would see him and recognize him, but out of self-respect he tried to look as if it were not he, but perhaps some one who closely resembled him. He perceived that it was a club dinner of some literary sort; but because he could not help wishing that he were one of the company, he snubbed his desires with unsparing cruelty. He looked down at his plate, and shunned the roving glance which he felt sure Mr. Kane was sending into the room where he now sat almost alone; and he did his best to be ashamed of overhearing the talk now and then. He grew very bitter in his solitude, and he imagined himself using Mr. Kane with great hauteur, after _A Modern Romeo_ had succeeded. He was not obliged to go out that way, when he left the dining-room, but he feigned that he must, and in spite of the lofty stand he had taken with Mr. Kane in fancy, he meanly passed quite near him. Kane looked up, and called out, “Ah, good-evening, good-evening!” and rose and shook hands with him, and asked him how in the world he happened to have found out that restaurant, and he was astonished to hear that Ray was staying in the hotel; he said that was very _chic_. He introduced him to the company generally, as his young friend Mr. Ray, of Midland, who had come on to cast in his literary lot with them in New York; and then he presented him personally to the nearest on either hand. They were young fellows, but their names were known to Ray with the planetary distinctness that the names of young authors have for literary aspirants, though they are all so nebulous to older eyes.

Mr. Kane asked Ray to sit down and take his coffee with them; Ray said he had taken his coffee; they all urged that this was no reason why he should not take some more; he stood out against them, like a fool--as he later called himself with gnashing teeth. He pretended he had an engagement, and he left the pleasant company he was hungering so to join, and went out and walked the streets, trying to stay himself with the hope that he had made a better impression than if he had remained and enjoyed himself. He was so lonesome when he came back, and caught the sound of their jolly voices on his way up stairs, that he could hardly keep from going in upon them, and asking if they would let him sit with them. In his room he could not work; he wanted to shed tears in his social isolation. He determined to go back to Midland, at any cost to his feelings or fortunes, or even to the little village where his family lived, and where he had been so restless and unhappy till he could get away from it. Now, any place seemed better than this waste of unknown hundreds of thousands of human beings, where he had not a friend, or even an enemy.

XII.

In the morning Ray woke resolved to brace up against the nerveless suspense he had been in ever since he had left his manuscript with Mr. Brandreth, and go and present the letters that some people in Midland had given him to their friends in New York. At least he need not suffer from solitude unless he chose; he wondered if it would do to present his letters on Sunday.

He breakfasted in this question. Shortly after he went back to his room, there was a knock at his door, and when he shouted “Come in!” it was set softly ajar, and Mr. Kane showed his face at the edge of it.

“I suppose you know,” he said, ignoring Ray’s welcome, “or if you haven’t been out, you don’t know, that this is one of those Sunday mornings which make you feel that it has been blessed and hallowed above all the other days of the week. But I dare say,” he added, coming inside, “that the Mohammedans feel exactly so about a particularly fine Friday.”

He glanced round the little room with an air of delicate impartiality, and asked leave to look from Ray’s window. As he put his head out, he said to the birds in the eaves, “Ah, sparrows!” as if he knew them personally, before he began to make compliments to the picturesque facts of the prospect. Then he stood with his back to Ray, looking down into the street, and praising the fashion of the shadow and sunshine in meeting so solidly there, at all sorts of irregular points and angles. Once he looked round and asked, with the sun making his hair all a shining silver:

“Has any one else been shown this view? No? Then let me be the first to utter the stock imbecility that it ought to inspire you if anything could.” He put out his head again, and gave a glance upward at the speckless heaven, and then drew it in. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “a partially clouded sky is better for us, no doubt. Why didn’t you sit down with us last night? I saw that you wished to do so.” He faced Ray benignly, with a remote glimmer of mocking in his eye.

Ray felt it safest to answer frankly. “Yes, I did want to join you awfully. I overheard a good deal you were saying where I was sitting, but I couldn’t accept your invitation. I knew it was a great chance, but I couldn’t.”

“Don’t you know,” Mr. Kane asked, “that the chances have a polite horror of iteration? Those men and those moods may never be got together again. You oughtn’t to have thrown such a chance away!”

“I know,” said Ray. “But I had to.”

Mr. Kane leaned back in the chair he had taken, and murmured as if to himself: “Ah, youth, youth! Yes, it has to throw chances away. Waste is a condition of survival. Otherwise we should perish of mere fruition. But could you,” he asked, addressing Ray more directly, “without too much loss to the intimacies that every man ought to keep sacred, could you tell me just _why_ you had to refuse us your company?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ray, with the self-scorn which Mr. Kane’s attitude enabled him to show. “I was so low-spirited that I couldn’t rise to the hands that offered to pull me out of my Slough of Despond. I felt that the slightest exertion would sink me over head and ears. I had better stay as I was.”

“I understand,” said Mr. Kane. “But why should a man of your age be in low spirits?”

“Why? Nobody can tell why he’s in low spirits exactly. I suppose I got to thinking the prospect for my book wasn’t very gay. It’s hard to wait.”

“Was that all?”

“I was a little homesick, too. But wasn’t the other enough?”

“I can’t say. It’s a long time since I was your age. But shall I tell you what I first thought your unhappiness was, when you confessed it just now?”

“Yes, by all means.”

“I wonder if I’d better! I supposed it was not such as any _man_ could inflict. Excuse me!” He kept his eyes smilingly on the young fellow’s face, as if to prevent his taking the audacity in bad part. “I don’t know why I should say this to you, except that it really went through my mind, and I did you the wrong to wonder why you should mention it.”

“I can forgive the wrong; it’s so very far from the fact”--Ray began.

“Ah, you’ve already noticed _that_!” Mr Kane interrupted.

“Noticed what?”

“That we can forgive people their injurious conjectures when they’re wrong rather than when they’re right?”

“No, I hadn’t noticed,” Ray confessed; and he added, “I was only thinking how impossible that was for me in a place where I haven’t spoken to a woman yet.”

If Mr. Kane tasted the bitterness in a speech which Ray tried to carry off with a laugh, his words did not confess it. “It wasn’t a reasoned conjecture, and I don’t defend it; I’m only too glad to escape from it without offence. When I was of your age, a slight from a woman was the only thing that could have kept me from any pleasure that offered itself. But I understand that now youth is made differently.”

“I don’t see why,” said Ray, and he quelled a desire he had to boast of his wounds; he permitted himself merely to put on an air of gloom.

“Why, I’ve been taught that modern society and civilization generally has so many consolations for unrequited affection that young men don’t suffer from that sort of trouble any more, or not deeply.”

Ray was sensible that Mr. Kane’s intrusiveness was justifiable upon the ground of friendly interest; and he was not able to repel what seemed like friendly interest. “It may be as you say, in New York; I’ve not been here long enough to judge.”

“But in Midland things go on in the old way? Tell me something about Midland, and why any one should ever leave Midland for New York?”

“I can’t say, generally speaking,” answered Ray, with pleasure in Kane’s pursuit, “but I think that in my case Midland began it.”

“Yes?”

Ray was willing enough to impart as much of his autobiography as related to the business change that had thrown him out of his place on the _Echo_. Then he sketched with objective airiness the sort of life one led in Midland, if one was a young man in society; and he found it no more than fair to himself to give some notion of his own local value in a graphic little account of the farewell dinner.

“Yes,” said Mr. Kane, “I can imagine how you should miss all that, and I don’t know that New York has anything so pleasant to offer. I fancy the conditions of society are incomparably different in Midland and in New York. You seem to me a race of shepherds and shepherdesses out there; your pretty world is like a dream of my own youth, when Boston was still only a large town, and was not so distinctly an aoristic Athens as it is now.”

“I had half a mind to go to Boston with my book first,” said Ray. “But somehow I thought there were more chances in New York.”

“There are certainly more publishers,” Kane admitted. “Whether there are more chances depends upon how much independent judgment there is among the publishers. Have you found them very judicial?”

“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Did any one of them seem to be a man who would give your novel an unprejudiced reading if you took it to him and told him honestly that it had been rejected by all the others?”

“No, I can’t say any of them did. But I don’t know that I could give my manuscript an unprejudiced reading myself under the same circumstances. I certainly shouldn’t blame any publisher who couldn’t. Should you?”

“I? I blame nobody, my dear friend,” said Kane. “That is the way I keep my temper. I should not blame you if Chapley & Co. declined your book, and you went to the rest of the trade carefully concealing from each publisher, the fact that he was not the first you had approached with it.”

Ray laughed, but he winced, too. “I suppose that’s what I should have to do. But Chapley & Co. haven’t declined it yet.”

“Ah, I’m glad of that. Not that you could really impose upon any one. There would be certain infallible signs in your manuscript that would betray you: an air of use; little private marks and memoranda of earlier readers; the smell of their different brands of tobacco and sachet powder.”

“I shouldn’t try to impose upon any one,” Ray began, with a flush of indignation, which ended in shame. “What would _you_ do under the same circumstances?” he demanded, with desperation.

“My dear friend! My dear boy,” Mr. Kane protested. “I am not censuring you. It’s said that Bismarck found it an advantage to introduce truth even into diplomacy. He discovered there was nothing deceived _like_ it; _nobody_ believed him. Some successful advertisers have made it work in commercial affairs. You mustn’t expect me to say what I should do under the same circumstances; the circumstances couldn’t be the same. I am not the author of a manuscript novel with a potential public of tens of thousands. But you can imagine that as the proprietor of a volume of essays which has a certain sale--Mr. Brandreth used that fatal term in speaking of my book, I suppose?”

“No, I don’t remember that he did,” said Ray.

“He was kinder than I could have expected. It is the death-knell of hope to the devoted author when his publisher tells him that his book will always have a certain sale; he is expressing in a pitying euphemism of the trade that there is no longer any chance for it, no happy accident in the future, no fortuity; it is dead. As the author of a book with a certain sale, I feel myself exempt from saying what I should do in your place. But I’m very glad it hasn’t come to the ordeal with you. Let us hope you won’t be tempted. Let us hope that Messrs. Chapley & Co. will be equal to the golden opportunity offered them, and gradually--snatch it.”

Kane smiled, and Ray laughed out. He knew that he was being played upon, but he believed the touch was kindly, and even what he felt an occasional cold cynicism in it had the fascination that cynicism always has for the young when it does not pass from theory to conduct; when it does that, it shocks. He thought that Mr. Kane was something like Warrington in _Pendennis_, and again something like Coverdale in _Blithedale Romance_. He valued him for that; he was sure he had a history; and when he now rose, Ray said: “Oh, must you go?” with eager regret.

“Why, I had thought of asking you to come with me. I’m going for a walk in the Park, and I want to stop on the way for a moment to see an old friend of mine”--he hesitated, and then added--“a man whom I was once intimately associated with in some joint hopes we had for reconstructing the world. I think you will be interested in him, as a type, even if you don’t like him.”

Ray professed that he should be very much interested, and they went out together.

XIII.

The streets had that Sunday sense which is as unmistakable as their week-day effect. Their noises were subdued almost to a country quiet; as he crossed with his friend to the elevated station, Ray noted with a lifting heart the sparrows that chirped from the knots and streamers of red Virginia-creeper hanging here and there from a porch roof or over a bit of garden wall; overhead the blue air was full of the jargoning of the blended church bells.

He tried to fit these facts with phrases in the intervals of his desultory talk with Kane, and he had got two or three very good epithets by the time they found seats together in an up-town train. It was not easy to find them, for the cars were thronged with work-people going to the Park for one of the last Sundays that could be fine there.