Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He went on to tell Ray some of the things he had said in his paragraphs, and Ray listened with that mingled shame and pleasure which the artist must feel whenever the commercial side of his life presents itself.

  “I kept Miss Hughes pretty late this afternoon, working the things into shape, so as to get them to the papers at once. I just give her the main points, and she has such a neat touch.”

  Ray left his publisher with a light heart, and a pious sense of the divine favor. He had conceived of a difficult duty, and he had discharged it with unflinching courage. He had kept his word to Hughes; he had done all that he could for him, even to offering his own chance of fame and fortune a sacrifice to him. Now he could do no more, and if he could not help being glad that the sacrifice had not been accepted of him, he was not to be blamed. He was very much to be praised, and he rewarded himself with a full recognition of his virtue; he imagined some words, few but rare, from Peace, expressing her sense of his magnanimity, when she came to know of it. He hoped that a fact so creditable to him, and so characteristic, would not escape the notice of his biographer. He wished that Hughes could know what he had done, and in his revery he contrived that his generous endeavor should be brought to the old man’s knowledge; he had Hughes say that such an action was more to him than the publication of his book.

  Throughout his transport of self-satisfaction there ran a nether torment of question whether Peace Hughes could possibly suppose that he was privy to that paragraphing about his book, and this finally worked to the surface, and become his whole mood. After his joyful riot it was this that kept him awake till morning, that poisoned all his pleasure in his escape from self-sacrifice. He could only pacify himself and get some sleep at last by promising to stop at the publisher’s on his way down to the Every Evening office in the morning, and beseech her to believe that he had nothing to do with priming the press, and that he wished Mr. Brandreth had not told him of it Nothing less than this was due him in the character that he desired to appear in hereafter.

  He reached the publisher’s office before Mr. Brandreth came down, and when he said he would like to see Miss Hughes, the clerk answered that Miss Hughes had sent word that her father was not so well, and she would not be down that day.

  “He’s pretty low, I believe,” the clerk volunteered.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Ray.

  He asked if the clerk would call a messenger to take a note from him to his office, and when he had despatched it he went up to see Hughes.

  “Did you get our message?” Peace asked him the first thing.

  “No,” said Ray. “What message?”

  “That we sent to your office. He has been wanting to see you ever since he woke this morning. I knew you would come!”

  “O yes. I went to inquire of you about him at Chapley’s, and when I heard that he was worse, of course I came. Is he much worse?”

  “He can’t live at all. The doctor says it’s no use. He wants to see you. Will you come in?”

  “Peace!” Ray hesitated. “Tell me! Is it about his book?”

  “Yes, something about that He wishes to speak with you.”

  “Oh, Peace! I’ve done all I could about that I went straight to Mr. Brandreth and tried to get him to take it But I couldn’t What shall I tell your father, if he asks me?”

  “You must tell him the truth,” said the girl, sadly.

  “Is that Mr. Ray?” Mrs. Denton called from the sick-room. “Come in, Mr. Ray. Father wants you.”

  “In a moment Come here, Mrs. Denton,” Ray called back.

  She came out, and he told her what he had told Peace. She did not seem to see its bearing at once. When she realized it all, and had spent her quick wrath in denunciation of Mr. Brandreth’s heartlessness, she said desperately: “Well, you must come now. Perhaps it isn’t his book; perhaps it’s something else. But he wants you.”

  She had to rouse her father from the kind of torpor in which he lay like one dead. She made him understand who was there, and then he smiled, and turned his eyes appealingly toward Ray. “Put your ear as close to his lips as you can. He can’t write any more. He wants to say something to you.”

  Ray stooped over and put his ear to the drawn lips. A few whiffs of inarticulate breath mocked the dying man’s endeavor to speak. “I’m sorry; I can’t catch a syllable,” said Ray.

  A mute despair showed itself in the old man’s eyes.

  “Look at me father!” cried Mrs. Denton. “Is it about your book?”

  The faintest smile came over his face.

  “Did you wish to ask Mr. Ray if he would speak to Mr. Brandreth about it?”

  The smile dimly dawned again.

  “Well, he has spoken to him. He went to see him last night, and he’s come to tell you” — Ray shuddered and held his breath—” to tell you that Mr. Brandreth will take your book, and lie’s going to publish it right away!”

  A beatific joy lit up Hughes’s face; and Ray drew a long breath. —

  Peace looked at her sister.

  “I don’t care!” said Mrs. Denton, passionately, dropping her voice. “You have your light, and I have mine.”

  XXXIX.

  RAY followed Hughes to his grave in the place where Denton and his children were already laid. It did not seem as if the old man were more related to them in death than he had been in life by their propinquity; but it satisfied a belated maternal and conjugal sentiment in Mrs. Denton. She did not relinquish the leading place in the family affairs which she had taken in her father’s last days. She decided against staying in their present apartment after their month was out, and found a tiny flat of three rooms in a better neighborhood down-town, where she had their scanty possessions established, including the cat Kane did not go to the funeral because of a prejudice which he said he had against such events; David Hughes, he said, would have been the first to applaud his sincerity in staying away. But he divined that there might be need of help of another kind in the emergency, and he gave it generously and delicately. He would not suffer Mr. Brandreth to render any part of this relief; he insisted that it was his exclusive privilege as Hughes’s old friend. Now that David was gone, he professed a singularly vivid sense of his presence; and he owned that he had something like the pleasure of carrying a point against him in defraying his funeral expenses.

  Hughes’s daughters accepted his help frankly, each after her kind: Mrs. Denton as a gift which it must long continue to be; Peace as a loan which must some day be repaid. The girl went back to her work in due time, and whenever Ray visited his publisher he saw her at her desk.

  He did not always go to speak to her, for he had a shamefaced fear that she was more or less always engaged in working up hints from Mr. Brandreth into paragraphs about A Modern Romeo. His consciousness exaggerated the publisher’s activity in this sort; and at first he shunned all these specious evidences of public interest in the forthcoming novel. Then he began jealously to look for them, and in his mind he arraigned the journals where they did not appear for envy and personal spite. It would have been difficult for him to prove why there should have been either in his case, unless it was because their literary notes were controlled by people whose books had been ignored or censured by Every Evening, and this theory could not hold with all. Most of the papers, however, published the paragraphs, with that munificence which journalism shows towards literature. The author found the inspired announcements everywhere; sometimes they were varied by the office touch, but generally they were printed exactly as Mr. Brandreth framed them; however he found them, they gave Ray an insensate joy. Even the paragraphs in the trade journals, purely perfunctory as they were, had a flavor of sincere appreciation; the very advertisements which accompanied them there affected him like favorable expressions of opinion. His hunger for them was inappeasable; in his heart he accused Mr. Brandreth of a stinted proclamation.

  The publisher was hurrying the book forward for the summer trade, and was aiming it especially at the reader going into th
e country, or already there. He had an idea that the summer resorts had never been fully worked in behalf of the better sort of light literature, and he intended to make any sacrifice to get the book pushed by the news companies. He offered them rates ruinously special, and he persuaded Ray to take five per cent on such sales if they could be made. He pressed forward the printing, and the author got his proofs in huge batches, with a demand for their prompt return. The nice revision which he had fancied himself giving the work in type was impossible; it went from his hand with crudities that glared in his tormented sense, till a new instalment eclipsed the last. He balanced the merits and defects against one another, and tried to believe that the merits would distract the attention of criticism from the defects. He always knew that the story was very weak in places; he conceived how it could be attacked in these; he attacked it himself with pitiless ridicule in a helpless impersonation of different reviewers; and he gasped in his self-inflicted anguish. When the last proof left his hands the feeblest links were the strength of the whole chain, which fell to pieces from his grasp like a rope of sand.

  There was some question at different times whether the book had not better be published under a pseudonym, and Ray faithfully submitted it to the editor of Every Evening, as something he was concerned in. It was to be considered whether it was advisable for a critic to appear as an author, and whether the possible failure of the book would not react unfavorably upon the criticisms of the journal. The chief decided that it would make no difference to him, and at the worst it could do no more than range Ray with the other critics who had failed as authors. With the publisher it was a more serious matter, and he debated much whether the book, as a stroke of business, had not better go to the public anonymously. They agreed that P. B. S. Ray on the title-page would be rather formidable from the number of the initials which the reader would have to master in speaking of the author. Shelley Ray, on the other hand, would be taken for a sentimental pseudonym. They decided that anonymity was the only thing for it.

  “But then, it will be losing the interest of your money, if the book goes,” Mr. Brandreth mused. “You have a right to the cumulative reputation from it, so that if you should write another” —

  “Oh, don’t be afraid of there ever being another!” said Ray, with his distracted head between his hands. He suddenly lifted it. “What is the matter with the Spartan severity of S. Ray?”

  “S. Ray might do,” Mr. Brandreth assented, thoughtfully. “Should you mind my asking Mrs. Brandreth how it strikes her?”

  “Not at all. Very glad to have you. It’s short, and unpretentious, and non-committal. I think it might do.”

  Mrs. Brandreth thought so too, and in that form the author’s name appeared on the title-page. Even in that form it did not escape question and censure. One reviewer devoted his criticism of the story to inquiry into the meaning of the author’s initial; another surmised it a mask. But, upon the whole, its simplicity piqued curiosity, and probably promoted the fortune of the book, as far as that went.

  There was no immediate clamor over it. In fact, it was received so passively by the public and the press that the author might well have doubted whether there was any sort of expectation of it, in spite of the publisher’s careful preparation of the critic’s or the reader’s mind. There came back at once from obscure quarters a few echoes, more or less imperfect, of the synopsis of the book’s attractions sent out with the editorial copies, but the influential journals remained heart-sickeningly silent concerning A Modern Romeo. There was a boisterous and fatuous eulogy of the book in the Midland Echo, which Ray knew for the expression of Sanderson’s friendship; but eager as he was for recognition, he could not let this count; and it was followed by some brief depreciatory paragraphs in which he perceived the willingness of Hanks Brothers to compensate themselves for having so handsomely let Sanderson have his swing. He got some letters of acknowledgment from people whom he had sent the book; he read them with hungry zest, but he could not make himself believe that they constituted impartial opinion; not even the letter of the young lady who had detected him in the panoply of his hero, and who now wrote to congratulate him on a success which she too readily took for granted. One of his sisters replied on behalf of his father and mother, and said they had all been sitting up reading the story aloud together, and that their father liked it as much as any of them; now they were anxious to see what the papers would say; had he read the long review in the Echo, and did not he think it rather cool and grudging for a paper that he had been connected with? He hardly knew whether this outburst of family pride gave him more or less pain than an anonymous letter which he got from his native village, and which betrayed the touch of the local apothecary; his correspondent, who also dealt in books, and was a man of literary opinions, heaped the novel with ridicule and abuse, and promised the author a coat of tar and feathers on the part of his betters whom he had caricatured, if ever he should return to the place. Ray ventured to offer a copy to the lady who had made herself his social sponsor in New York, and he hoped for some intelligent praise from her. She asked him where in the world he had got together such a lot of queer people, like nothing on earth but those one used to meet in the old days when one took country board; she mocked at the sufferings of his hero, and said what a vulgar little piece his heroine was; but she supposed he meant them to be what they were, and she complimented him on his success in handling them. She confessed, though, that she never read American novels, or indeed any but French ones, and that she did not know exactly where to rank his work; she burlesqued a profound impression of the honor she ought to feel in knowing a distinguished novelist. “You’ll be putting us all into your next book, I suppose. Mind you give me golden hair, not yet streaked with silver.”

  In the absence of any other tokens of public acceptance, Ray kept an eager eye out for such signs of it as might be detected in the booksellers’ windows and on their sign-boards. The placards of other novels flamed from their door-jambs, but they seemed to know nothing of A Modem Romeo. He sought his book in vain among those which formed the attractions of their Casements; he found it with difficulty on their counters, two or three rows back, and in remote corners. It was like a conspiracy to keep it out of sight; it was not to be seen on the news-stands of the great hotels or the elevated stations, and Ray visited the principal railway depots without detecting a copy.

  He blamed Mr. Brandreth for a lack of business energy in all this; he would like to see him fulfil some of those boasts of push which, when he first heard them, made him creep with shame. Mr. Brandreth had once proposed a file of sandwich men appealing with succeesive bil-boards:

  I.

  HAVE YOU HEAD

  II.

  “A Modern Romeo?”

  III.

  EVERY ONE IS READING

  IV.

  “A MODERN ROMEO.”

  V.

  WHY?

  VI.

  BECAUSE

  VII.

  “A MODERN ROMEO” IS

  VIII.

  THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

  Ray had absolutely forbidden this procession, but now he would have taken off his hat to it, and stood uncovered, if he could have met it in Union Square or in Twenty-third Street.

  XL.

  IN this time of suspense Ray kept away from old Kane, whose peculiar touch he could not bear. But he knew perfectly well what his own feelings were, and he did not care to have them analyzed. He could not help sending Kane the book, and for a while he dreaded his acknowledgments; then he resented his failure to make any.

  In the frequent visits he paid to his publisher, he fancied that his welcome from Mr. Brandreth was growing cooler, and he did not go so often. He kept doggedly at his work in the Every Evening office; but here the absolute silence of his chief concerning his book was as hard to bear as Mr. Brandreth’s fancied coolness; he could not make out whether it meant compassion or dissatisfaction, or how it was to effect his relation to the paper. The worst of it was th
at his adversity, or his delayed prosperity, which ever it was, began to corrupt him. In his self-pity he wrote so leniently of some rather worthless books that he had no defence to make when his chief called his attention to the wide divergence between his opinions and those of some other critics. At times when he resented the hardship of his fate he scored the books before him with a severity that was as unjust as the weak commiseration in his praises. He felt sure that if the situation prolonged itself his failure as an author must involve his failure as a critic.

  It was not only the coolness in Mr. Brandreth’s welcome which kept him aloof; he had a sense of responsibility, which was almost a sense of guilt, in the publisher’s presence, for he was the author of a book which had been published contrary to the counsel of all his literary advisers. It was true that he had not finally asked Mr. Brandreth to publish it, but he had been eagerly ready to have him do it; he had kept his absurd faith in it, and his steadfastness must have imparted a favorable conviction to Mr. Brandreth; he knew that there had certainly been ever so much personal kindness for him mixed up with its acceptance. The publisher, however civil outwardly — and Mr. Brandreth, with all his foibles, was never less than a gentleman — must inwardly blame him for his unlucky venture. The thought of this became intolerable, and at the end of a Saturday morning, when the book was three or four weeks old, he dropped in at Chapley’s to have it out with Mr. Brandreth. The work on the Saturday edition of the paper was always very heavy, and Ray’s nerves were fretted from the anxieties of getting it together, as well as from the intense labor of writing. He was going to humble himself to the publisher, and declare their failure to be all his own fault; but he had in reserve the potentiality of a bitter quarrel with him if he did not take it in the right way.