Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Ray said, “Oh, I forgot it,” and he went back to his table and got his check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse apologies. Apparently they were too used to such tricks at that restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at every moment he got he reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a little of Sanderson’s cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters for the Midland Echo; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five dollars a week.

  He determined to begin a letter to the Echo at once; and he went to open the window to give himself some air in the close room; but he found that it would not open. He pulled down the transom over his door to keep from stifling in the heat of his gas-burner, and some voices that had been merely a dull rumbling before now made themselves heard in talk which Ray could not help listening to.

  Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy bell.

  “No,” he said; “I’d better fail, Bill. It’s no use trying to keep along. I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the dollar, I guess, and that’s more than most business men could, if they stopped; and if I ever get goin’ again, I’ll pay dollar for dollar; they know that.”

  The man with the deep voice said something that Ray did not catch. The disheartened man seemed not to have caught it either; he said, “What say?” and when the other repeated his words, he said: “Oh yes! I know. But I been dancing round in a quart cup all my life there; and now it’s turning into a pint cup, and I guess I better get out The place did grow for a while, and we got all ready to be a city as soon as the railroad come along. But when the road come, it didn’t do all we expected of it. We could get out into the world a good deal easier than we could before, and we had all the facilities of transportation that we could ask for. But we could get away so easy that most of our people went to the big towns to do their trading, and the facilities for transportation carried off most of our local industries. The luck was against us. We bet high on what the road would do for us, and we lost. We paid out nearly our last dollar to get the road to come our way, and it came, and killed us. We subscribed to the stock, and we’ve got it yet; there ain’t any fight for it anywhere else; we’d let it go without a fight We tried one while for the car shops, but they located them further up the line, and since that we ha’n’t even wiggled. What say? Yes; but, you see, I’m part of the place. I’ve worked hard all my life, and I’ve held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but I guess I sha’n’t hold out this time. What’s the use? Most every business man I know has failed some time or other; some of ’em three or four times over, and scrambled up and gone on again, and I guess I got to do the same. Had a kind of pride about it, m’ wife and me; but I guess we got to come to it. It does seem, sometimes, as if the very mischief was in it. I lost pretty heavy, for a small dealer, on Fashion’s Pansy, alone — got left with a big lot of ‘em. What say? It was a bustle. Women kept askin’ for Fashion’s Pansy, till you’d ‘a’ thought every last one of ’em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all at once none of ’em wanted it —— wouldn’t touch it. That and butter begun it You know how a country merchant’s got to take all the butter the women bring him, and he’s got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for grease half the time. You can tell a woman she’d better keep an eye on her daughter, but if you say she don’t make good butter, that’s the last of that woman’s custom. But what’s finally knocked me out is this drop in bric-à-brac. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess I could have pulled through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so long, that I loaded up all I could with ’em last time I was in New York, and now nobody wants ‘em; couldn’t give ’em away. Well, it’s all a game, and you don’t know any more how it’s comin’ out — you can’t bet on it with any more certainty — than you can on a trottin’ match. My! I wish I was dead.”

  The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man again retorted:

  “What say? Oh, it’s all well enough to preach; and I’ve heard about the law of demand and supply before. There’s about as much of a law to it as there is to three-card monte. If it wasn’t for my poor wife, I’d let ’em take me back on ice. I would that.”

  The deep-voiced man now seemed to have risen; there was a shuffling of feet, and presently a parley at the open door about commonplace matters; and then the two men exchanged adieux, and the door shut again, and all was silent in the room opposite Ray’s.

  He felt sorry for the unhappy man shut in there; but he perceived no special significance in what he had overheard. He had no great curiosity about the matter; it was one of those things that happened every day, and for tragedy was in no wise comparable to a disappointment in first love, such as he had carefully studied for his novel from his own dark experience. Still it did suggest something to Ray; it suggested a picturesque opening for his first New York letter for the Midland Echo, and he used it in illustration of the immensity of New York, and the strange associations and juxtapositions of life there. He treated the impending failure of the country storekeeper from an overstock of Japanese goods rather humorously: it was not like a real trouble, a trouble of the heart; and the cause seemed to him rather grotesquely disproportionate to the effect. In describing the incident as something he had overheard in a hotel, he threw in some touches that were intended to give the notion of a greater splendor than belonged to the place.

  He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair mattress.

  V.

  IN the morning, Ray determined that he would not breakfast at the restaurant under the hotel, partly because he was ashamed to meet the people who, he knew, suspected him of trying to beat them out of the price of his supper, and partly because he had decided that it was patronized chiefly by the country merchants who frequented the hotel, and he wanted something that was more like New York. He had heard of those foreign eating-houses where you got a meal served in courses at a fixed price, and he wandered about looking for one. He meant to venture into the first he found, and on a side street he came on a hotel with a French name, and over the door in an arch of gilt letters the inscription, Restaurant Français. There was a large tub on each side of the door, with a small evergreen tree in it; some strings or wires ran from these tubs to the door-posts and sustained a trailing vine tha
t formed a little bower on either hand; a Maltese cat in the attitude of a sphinx dozed in the thicket of foliage, and Ray’s heart glowed with a sense of the foreignness of the whole effect. He had never been abroad, but he had read of such things, and he found himself at home in an environment long familiar to his fancy.

  The difference of things was the source of his romance, as it is with all of us, and he looked in at the window of this French restaurant with the feelings he would have had in the presence of such a restaurant in Paris, and he began to imagine gay, light-minded pictures about it. At the same time, while he was figuring inside at one of the small tables, vis-à-vis with a pretty actress whom he invented for the purpose, he was halting on the sidewalk outside, wondering whether he could get breakfast there so early as eight o’clock, and doubtful whether he should not betray his strangeness to New York hours if he tried. When he went in there was nobody there but one white-aproned waiter, who was taking down some chairs from the middle table where they had been stacked with their legs in the air while he was sweeping. But he did not disdain to come directly to Ray, where he had sat down, with a plate and napkin and knife and fork, and exchange a good-morning with him in arranging them before him. Then he brought half a yard of French bread and a tenuous, translucent pat of American butter; and asked Ray whether he would have chops or beefsteak with his coffee. The steak came with a sprig of water-cress on it, and the coffee in a pot; and the waiter, who had one eye that looked at Ray, and another of uncertain focus, poured out the coffee for him, and stood near, with a friendly countenance, and a cordial interest in the young fellow’s appetite. By this time a neat dame de comptoir, whom Ray knew for a dame de comptoir at once, though he had never seen one before, took her place behind a little desk in the corner, and the day had begun for the Restaurant Français.

  Ray felt that it was life, and he prolonged his meal to the last drop of the second cup of coffee that his pot held, and he wished that he could have Sanderson with him to show him what life really was in New York. Sanderson had taken all his meals in the basement of that seventy-five cent hotel, which Ray meant to leave at once. Where he was he would not have been ashamed to have any of the men who had given him that farewell dinner see him. He was properly placed, as a young New York literary man; he was already a citizen of that great Bohemia which he had heard and read so much of. He was sure that artists must come there, and actors, but of course much later in the day. His only misgiving was lest the taxes of Bohemia might be heavier than he could pay, and he asked the waiter for his account somewhat anxiously. It was forty cents, and his ambition leaped at the possibility of taking all his meals at that place. He made the occasion of telling the cross-eyed waiter to keep the change out of the half-dollar he gave him, serve for asking whether one could take board there by the week, and the waiter said one could for six dollars: a luncheon like the breakfast, but with soup and wine, and a dinner of fish, two meats, salad, sweets, and coffee. “On Sundays,” said the waiter, “the dinner is something splendid. And there are rooms; oh, yes, it is a hotel.”

  “Yes, I knew it was a hotel,” said Ray.

  The six dollars did not seem to him too much;’ but he had decided that he must live on ten dollars a week in order to make his money last for a full experiment of New York, or till he had placed himself in some permanent position of profit. The two strains of prudence and of poetry were strongly blended in him; he could not bear to think of wasting money, even upon himself, whom he liked so well, and whom he wished so much to have a good time. He meant to make his savings go far; with those five hundred dollars he could live a year in New York if he helped himself out on dress and incidental expenses with the pay for his Midland Echo letters. He would have asked to see some of the rooms in the hotel, but he was afraid it was too early, and he decided to come to dinner and ask about them. On his way back to the place where he had lodged he rapidly counted the cost, and he decided, at any rate, to try it for awhile; and he shut himself into his cupboard at the hotel, and began to go over some pages of his manuscript for the last time, with a lightness of heart which decision, even a wrong decision, often brings.

  It was still too soon to go with the story to a publisher; he could not hope to find any one in before ten o’clock, and he had a whole hour yet to work on it He was always putting the last touches on it; but he almost wished he had not looked at it, now, when the touches must really be the last It seemed to suffer a sort of disintegration in his mind. It fell into witless and repellent fragments; it lost all beauty and coherence, so that he felt ashamed and frightened with it, and he could not think what the meaning of it had once so clearly been. He knew that no publisher would touch it in the way of business, and he doubted if any would really have it read or looked at. It seemed to him quite insane to offer it, and he had to summon an impudently cynical courage in nerving himself to the point. The best way, of course, would have been to get the story published first as a serial, in one of the magazines that had shown favor to his minor attempts; and Ray had tried this pretty fully. The manuscript had gone the rounds of a good many offices; and returned, after a longer or shorter sojourn, bearing on some marginal corner the hieroglyphic or numerical evidence that it had passed through the reader’s hand in each. Ray innocently fancied that he suppressed the fact by clipping this mark away with the scissors; but probably no one was deceived. In looking at it now he was not even deceived himself; the thing had a desperately worn and battered air; it was actually dog’s-eared; but he had still clung to the hope of getting it taken somewhere, because in all the refusals there was proof that the magazine reader had really read it through; and Ray argued that if this were so, there must be some interest or property in it that would attract the general reader if it could ever be got to his eye in print.

  He was not wrong; for the story was fresh and new, in spite of its simple-hearted, unconscious imitations of the style and plot of other stories, because it was the soul if not the body of his first love. He thought that he had wrapped this fact impenetrably up in so many travesties and disguises that the girl herself would not have known it if she had read it; but very probably she would have known it Any one who could read between the lines could penetrate through the innocent psychical posing and literary affectation to the truth of conditions strictly and peculiarly American, and it was this which Ray had tried to conceal with all sorts of alien splendors of make and manner. It seemed to him now, at the last moment, that if he could only uproot what was native and indigenous in it, he should make it a strong and perfect thing. He thought of writing it over again, and recoloring the heroine’s hair and the hero’s character, and putting the scene in a new place; but he had already rewritten it so many times that he was sick of it; and with all his changing he had not been able to change it much. He decided to write a New York novel, and derive the hero from Midland, as soon as he could collect the material; the notion for it had already occurred to him; the hero should come on with a play; but first of all it would be necessary for Ray to get this old novel behind him, and the only way to do that was to get it before the public.

  VI.

  RAY put his manuscript back into its covering and took it under his arm. He meant to make a thorough trial of the publishers, and not to be discouraged by his failures as long as a publisher was left untried. He knew from his experience with the magazine editors that it would be a slow affair, and he must have patience. Some of the publishers, even if they did not look at his story, would keep it for days or weeks with the intention or the appearance of reading it, and if they did read it they would of course want time for it. He expected this, and he calculated that it might very well take his manuscript six months to go the rounds of all the houses in New York. Yet he meant, if he could, to get it through sooner, and he was going to use his journalistic connection to make interest for it. He would have given everything but honor to have it known that he had written some things for Harper’s and the Century; he did not wish, or he said to himself and stoo
d to it that he did not wish, any favor shown his novel because he had written those things. At the same time he was willing the fact that he was the correspondent of the Midland Echo should help him to a prompt examination of his manuscript if it could; and he meant to let it be known that he was a journalist before he let it be known that he was an author.