Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 workpeople going to the Park for one of the last Sundays that could be fine there.

  Kane said: “The man we are going to see belongs to an order of thinking and feeling that one would have said a few years ago had passed away forever, but of late its turn seems to be coming again; it’s curious how these things recur. Do you happen to hate altruism in any of its protean forms?”

  Ray smiled with the relish for the question which Kane probably meant him to feel. “I can’t say that I have any violent feeling against it.”

  “It is usually repulsive to young people,” Kane went on, “and I could very well conceive your loathing it. My friend has been an altruist of one kind or another all his life. He’s a man whom it would be perfectly useless to tell that the world is quite good enough for the sort of people there are in it; he would want to set about making the people worthy of a better world, and he would probably begin on you. You have heard of Brook Farm, I suppose?”

  “Of course,” Ray answered, with a show of resentment for such a question. “Blithedale Romance — I think it’s the best of Hawthorne’s books.”

  “Blithedale,” said Mr. Kane, ignoring the literary interest, “is no more Brook Farm than — But we needn’t enter upon that! My friend’s career as an altruist began there; and since then there’s hardly been a communistic experiment in behalf of Man with a capital and without capital that he hasn’t been into and out of.”

  “I should like immensely to see him,” said Ray. “Any man who was at Brook Farm — Did he know Hollingsworth and Zenobia, and Priscilla and Coverdale? Was it at Brook Farm that you met?”

  Kane shook his head. “I think no one knew them but Hawthorne. I don’t speak positively; Brook Farm was a little before my day, or else I should have been there too, I dare say. But I’ve been told those characters never were.”

  Then it was doubly impossible that Hawthorne should have studied Miles Coverdale from Kane; Ray had to relinquish a theory he had instantly formed upon no ground except Kane’s sort of authority in speaking of Brook Farm; what was worse he had to abandon an instant purpose of carrying forward the romance and doing The Last Days of Miles Coverdale; it would have been an attractive title.

  “I met David Hughes,” Kane continued, “after the final break-up of the community, when I was beginning to transcendentalize around Boston, and he wanted me to go into another with him, out West. He came out of his last community within the year; he founded it himself, upon a perfectly infallible principle. It was so impregnable to the logic either of metaphysics or events, that Hughes had to break it up himself, I understand. At sixty-nine he has discovered that his efforts to oblige his fellow-beings ever since he was twenty have been misdirected. It isn’t long for an error of that kind in the life of the race, but it hasn’t exactly left my old friend in the vigor of youth. However, his hope and good-will are as athletic as ever.”

  “It’s rather pathetic,” Ray suggested.

  “Why, I don’t know — I don’t know! Is it so? He hasn’t found out the wrong way without finding the right way at the same time, and he’s buoyantly hopeful in it, though he’s not only an old man; he’s a sick man, too. Of course, he’s poor. He never was a fellow to do things by halves, and when he dispersed his little following he divided nearly all his substance among his disciples. He sees now that the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way; and if he could live long enough, we should see him in Congress — if we lived long enough. Naturally, he is paving the way with a book he’s writing.” Kane went on to speak of his friend at length; he suddenly glanced out of the car window, and said: “Ah, we’re just there. This is our station.”

  The avenue had been changing its character as they rushed along. It had ceased to be a street of three or four story houses, where for the most part the people lived over their shops, and where there was an effect of excessive use on everything, a worn-out and shabby look, rather than a squalid look. The cross-streets of towering tenement-houses, had come and gone, and now the buildings were low again, with greater or less gaps between them, while the railroad had climbed higher, and was like a line drawn through the air without reference to the localities which the train left swiftly behind. The houses had begun to be of wood here and there, and it was at a frame of two stories that Mr. Kane stopped with Ray, when they clambered down the long iron staircase of the station to the footway below. They pulled a bell that sounded faintly somewhere within, and the catch of the lock clicked as if it were trying to release itself; but when they tried the door it was still fast, and Mr. Kane rang again. Then a clatter of quick, impatient feet sounded on the stairs; the door was pulled sharply open, and they confronted a tall young man, with a handsome pale face, who bent on them a look of impartial gloom from clouded blue eyes under frowning brows. A heavy fringe of dull yellow hair almost touched their level with its straight line, which the lower lip of the impassioned mouth repeated.

  “Ah, Denton!” said Mr. Kane. “Good-morning, good-morning! This is my friend, Mr. Ray.” The young men shook hands with a provisional civility, and Mr. Kane asked, “Are you all at home?”

  “We are, at the moment,” said the other. “I’m just going out with the babies; but father will be glad to see you. Come in.”

  He had a thick voice that came from his throat by nervous impulses; he set the door open and twisted his head in the direction of the stairs, as if to invite them to go up. They found he had a perambulator in the narrow hall behind the door, and two children facing each other in it. He got it out on the sidewalk without further attention to them, and shut the door after him. But in the light which his struggles to get out had let into the entry they made their way up the stairs, where a woman’s figure stood silhouetted against an open door-way behind her.

  “Ah, Mrs. Denton, how do you do?” said Kane, gaily.

  The figure answered gaily back, “Oh, Mr. Kane!” and after Kane’s presentation of Ray, set open a door that opened from the landing into the apartment. “Father will be so glad to see you. Please walk in.”

  Ray found himself in what must be the principal room of the apartment; its two windows commanded an immediate prospect of the elevated road, with an effect of having their sills against its trestle work. Between them stood a tall, gaunt old man, whose blue eyes flamed under the heavy brows of age, from a face set in a wilding growth of iron-gray hair and beard. He was talking down upon a gentleman whom Ray had black against the light, and he was saying: “No, Henry, no! Tolstoï is mistaken. I don’t object to his theories of non-resistance; the Quakers have found them perfectly practicable for more than two centuries; but I say that in quitting the scene of the moral struggle, and in simplifying himself into a mere peasant, he begs the question as completely as if he had gone into a monastery. He has struck out some tremendous truths, I don’t deny that, and his examination of the conditions of civilization is one of the most terrifically searching studies of the facts that have ever been contributed to the science of sociology; but his conclusions are as wrong as his premises are right If I had back the years that I have wasted in a perfectly futile effort to deal with the problem of the race at a distance where I couldn’t touch it, I would have nothing to do with eremitism in any of its forms, either collectively as we have had it in our various communistic experiments, or individually on the terms which Tolstoï apparently advises.”

  “But I don’t understand him to advise eremitism,” the gentleman began.

  “It amounts to the same thing,” said the other, cutting himself short in hollow cough, so as not to give up the word. “He would have us withdraw from the world, as if, where any man was, the world was not there in the midst of him!”

  “Poor Tolstoï,” said Mr. Kane, going up and shaking hands wit
h the others, “as I understand it, is at present able only to rehearse his rôle, because his family won’t consent to anything else. He’s sold all he has in order to give to the poor, but his wife manages the proceeds.”

  “It’s easy enough to throw ridicule on him,” said the gentleman against the window, who now stood up.

  “I throw no ridicule upon him,” said the tall, gaunt man. “He has taught me at least this, that contempt is of the devil — I beg your pardon, Kane — and I appreciate to the utmost the spiritual grandeur of the man’s nature. But practically, I don’t follow him. We shall never redeem the world by eschewing it. Society is not to be saved by self-outlawry. The body politic is to be healed politically. The way to have the golden age is to elect it by the Australian ballot. The people must vote themselves into possession of their own business, and intrust their economic affairs to the same faculty that makes war and peace, that frames laws, and that does justice. What I object to in Tolstoï is his utter unpracticality. I cannot forgive any man, however good and great, who does not measure the means to the end. If there is anything in my own life that I can regard with entire satisfaction it is that at every step of my career I have invoked the light of common-sense. Whatever my enemies may say against me, they cannot say that I have not instantly abandoned any project when I found it unpractical. I abhor dreamers; they have no place in a world of thinking and acting.” Ray saw Kane arching his eyebrows, while the other began again: “I tell you” —

  “I want to introduce my young friend Mr. Ray,” Mr. Kane broke in.

  The old man took Ray’s hand between two hot palms, and said, “Ah!” with a look at him that was benign, if somewhat bewildered.

  “You know Mr. Ray, Chapley,” Kane pursued, transferring him to the other, who took his hand in turn.

  “Mr. Ray?” he queried, with the distress of the elderly man who tries to remember.

  “If you forget your authors in the green wood so easily, how shall it be with them in the dry?” Kane sighed; and now the publisher woke up to Ray’s identity.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes! Of course! Mr. Ray, of — of — Mr. Ray, of” —

  “Midland,” Ray suggested, perspiring.

  “Why, certainly!” Mr. Chapley pressed his hand with as much apologetic entreaty as he could intimate in that way, and assured him that he was glad to see him; and then he said to the old man, whose name Kane had not mentioned to Ray in presenting him, but whom Ray knew to be Hughes, “Well, I must be going now. I’m glad to find you looking so much better this morning.”

  “Oh; I’m quite a new man — quite a new man!”

  “You were always that!” said Mr. Chapley, with a certain fondness. He sighed, “I wish I knew your secret.”

  “Stay, and let him expound it to us all!” Kane suggested. “I’ve no doubt he would.”

  “No; I must be going,” said Mr. Chapley. “Good-by.” He shook hands with the old man. “Good-by, Kane. Er — good-morning, Mr. — er — Ray. You must drop in and see us, when you can find time.”

  Ray bubbled after him some incoherencies about being afraid he could find only too much time. Apparently Mr. Chapley did not hear. He pottered out on the landing, and Ray heard him feeling his way carefully down stairs. It was an immense relief for him to have met Mr. Chapley there. It stamped his own presence in the place with propriety; he was fond of adventure and hungry for experience, but he wished all his adventures and experiences to be respectable. He had a young dread of queerness and irregularity; and he could not conceal from himself that but for Mr. Chapley his present environment was not in keeping with his smooth Philistine traditions. He had never been in an apartment before, much less a mere tenement; at Midland every one he knew lived in his own house; most of the people he knew lived in handsome houses of their own, with large grass-plots and shade-trees about them. But if Mr. Chapley were here, with this old man who called him by his first name, and with whom he and Mr. Kane seemed to have the past if not the present in common, it must be all right.

  XIV.

  RAY woke from his rapid mental formulation of this comforting reassurance to find the old man saying to him, “What is the nature of the work that Chapley has published for you? I hope something by which you intend to advance others, as well as yourself: something that is to be not merely the means of your personal aggrandizement in fame and fortune. Nothing, in my getting back to the world, strikes me as more shamelessly selfish than the ordinary literary career. I don’t wonder the art has sunk so low; its aims are on the business level.”

  Mr. Kane listened with an air of being greatly amused, and even gratified, and Ray thought he had purposely let the old man go on as if he were an author who had already broken the shell. Before he could think of some answer that should at once explain and justify him, Kane interposed:

  “I hope Mr. Ray is no better than the rest of us; but he may be; you must make your arraignment and condemnation conditional, at any rate. He’s an author in petto, as yet; Chapley may never publish him.”

  “Then why,” said the old man, irascibly, “did you speak of him as you did to Chapley? It was misleading.”

  “In the world you’ve come back to, my dear friend,” said Kane, “you’ll find that we have no time to refine upon the facts. We can only sketch the situation in large, bold outlines. Perhaps I wished to give Mr. Ray a hold upon Chapley by my premature recognition of him as an author, and make the wicked publisher feel that there was already a wide general impatience to see Mr. Ray’s book.”

  “That would have been very corrupt, Kane,” said the other. “But I owe Mr. Ray an apology.”

  Ray found his tongue. “Perhaps you won’t think so when you see my novel.”

  “A novel! Oh, I have no time to read novels!” the old man burst out. “A practical man” —

  “Nor volumes of essays,” said Kane, picking up a book from the table at his elbow. “Really, as a measure of self-defence, I must have the leaves of my presentation copies cut, at any rate. I must sacrifice my taste to my vanity. Then I sha’n’t know when the grateful recipients haven’t opened them.”

  “I’ve no time to read books of any kind” — the old man began again.

  “You ought to set up reviewer,” Kane interposed again.

  “Oh, I’ve looked into your essays, Kane, here and there. The literature is of a piece with the affectation of the uncut edges: something utterly outdated and superseded. It’s all as impertinent as the demand you make that the reader should do the work of a bookbinder, and cut your leaves.”

  “Do you know that I’m really hurt — not for myself, but for you! — by what you say of my uncut edges? You descend to the level of a Brandreth,” said Kane.

  “A Brandreth? What is a Brandreth?”

  “It is a publisher: Chapley’s son-in-law and partner.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Hughes.

  “I spent many hours,” said Kane, plaintively, “ pleading with him for an edition with uncut edges. He contended that the public would not buy it if the edges were not cut; and I told him that I wished to have that fact to fall back upon, in case they didn’t buy it for some other reason. And I was right. The edition hasn’t sold, and the uncut edges have saved me great suffering until now. Why not have confined your own remarks, my dear friend, to the uncut edges? I might have agreed with you.”

  “Because” said the old man, “I cannot have patience with a man of your age who takes the mere dilettante view of life — who regards the world as something to be curiously inspected and neatly commented, instead of toiled for, sweated for, suffered for!”

  “It appears to me that there is toiling and sweating and suffering enough for the world already,” said Kane, with a perverse levity. “Look at the poor millionnaires, struggling to keep their employés in work! If you’ve come back to the world for no better purpose than to add to its perseverance and perspiration, I could wish for your own sake that you had remained in some of your communities — or all of them, for that
matter.”

  The other turned half round in his chair, and looked hard into Kane’s smiling face. “You are a most unserious spirit, Kane, and you always were! When will you begin to be different? Do you expect to continue a mere frivolous maker of phrases to the last? Your whole book there is just a bundle of phrases — labels for things. Do you ever intend to be anything?”

  “I intend to be an angel, some time — or some eternity,” said Kane. “But, in the meanwhile, have you ever considered that perhaps you are demanding, in your hopes of what you call the redemption of the race from selfishness, as sheer and mere an impossibility as a change of the physical basis of the soul?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean — or, I won’t put it affirmatively; I will put it interrogatively.”

  “Yes, that was always your way!”

  “I will merely ask you,” Kane went on, without heeding the interruption, “what reason you have to suppose the altruistic is not eternally conditioned in the egoistic, just as the spiritual is conditioned in the animal?”

  “What jargon is that?” demanded the old man, throwing one leg over the other, and smoothing the upper one down with his hand, as he bent forward to glower at Kane.

  “It is the harmony of the spheres, my dear David; it is a metaphysical variation of the pleasing air that the morning stars sang together; it is the very truth.

  The altruistic can no more shake off the egoistic in this world than the spiritual can shake off the animal. As soon as man ceases to get hungry three times a day, just so soon will he cease to eat his fellow-man.”

  “There is the usual trivial truth in what you say,” Hughes replied, “and the usual serious impiety. You probably are not aware that your miserable paradox accuses the Creative Intelligence.”

  “Ah, but use another word! Say Nature, and then where is the impiety?”

  “But I decline to use the other word,” Hughes retorted.