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.
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 work-people 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 with 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.