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outdated and superseded.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.
“And I insist upon it; I must. It is Nature that I accuse; not the
divine nature, or even human nature, but brute nature, that commits a
million blunders, and destroys myriads of types, in order to arrive at
such an imperfect creature as man still physically is, after untold ages
of her blind empiricism. If the human intelligence could be put in
possession of the human body, we should have altruism at once. We should
not get hungry three times a day; instead of the crude digestive
apparatus which we have inherited with apparently no change whatever
from the cave-dweller, we should have an organ delicately adjusted to
the exigencies of modern life, and responsive to all the emotions of
philanthropy. But no! The stomach of the nineteenth century remains
helplessly in the keeping of primeval nature, who is a mere Bourbon; who
learns nothing and forgets nothing. She obliges us to struggle on with a
rude arrangement developed from the mollusk, and adapted at best to the
conditions of the savage; imperative and imperfect; liable to get out of
order with the carefulest management, and to give way altogether with
the use of half a lifetime. No, David! You will have to wait until man
has come into control of his stomach, and is able to bring his ingenuity
to bear upon its deficiencies. Then, and not till then, you will have
the Altruistic Man. Until then the egoistic man will continue to eat his
brother, and more or less indigest him--if there is such a verb.”
Ray listened with one ear to them. The other was filled with the soft
murmur of women’s voices from the further end of the little apartment;
they broke now and then from a steady flow of talk, and rippled into
laughter, and then smoothed themselves to talk again. He longed to know
what they were talking about, laughing about.
“No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of
Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the
millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium, _per se_,
except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse
its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays;
but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never
disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it
come a great many times, and go even oftener.”
“Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Ray that it made him start
in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask
one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,”
and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.
He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room,
and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring
smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddently
fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they
were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in
a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young
Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other
looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines
of the pocket-book affair on the train.
He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg
your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his”--
He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and
gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she
took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself
comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they
were, and went out with it.
Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he
wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you
sit down--if it isn’t too hot here?”