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 that
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.