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 aesthetics, 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 sittin
g, 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 modem 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 yo
u 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.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 515