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 sitting,
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 modern 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 you 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.