“If ever I come again,” Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the
street, “I think I shall know it!” He abhorred all sorts of social
outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and
within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the
present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of
author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with
a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled
with a sense of personal injury from Hughes’s asking him to take part in
their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent
it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him
see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of
favor done which he must not allow to become painful.
He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains
hurtling by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday
crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with
laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in
the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more
resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.
He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the
avenue and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park.
Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space,
in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous
depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky
hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday
rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At
the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down
upon the havoc thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet
pleasance.
“Amiable prospect, isn’t it?” said Kane. “It looks as if Hughes’s Afreet
has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a
rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn’t to judge of it
at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it
will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!” He
passed his hand through Ray’s lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward
him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on
the scenery. “Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear
old friend?”
“Of Mr. Hughes?” Ray asked; and he restrained himself in a pretended
question.
“Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes’s friends.”
Ray flashed out upon this. “I think his friends are a lot of cranks.”
“Yes; very good; very excellent good! They _are_ a lot of cranks. Are
they the first you have met in New York?”
“No; the place seems to be full of them.”
“Beginning with the elderly gentleman whom you met the first morning?”
“Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman.”
Kane smiled with appreciation. “Well, we won’t be harsh on those two. We
won’t call _them_ cranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired
dreamers, if you like. As I understand it, we are all dreamers. If we
like a man’s dream, we call him a prophet; if we don’t like his dream,
we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally
and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny
that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the
directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes
inside of six months?”
The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. “What
is the matter with the world?” he burst out. “I don’t see that the world
is so very sick. Why isn’t it going on very well? I don’t understand
what this talk is all about. I don’t see what those people have got to
complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his
work is worth, and let the best man win. What’s the trouble? Where’s the
wrong?”
“Ah,” said Kane, “what a pity you didn’t set forth those ideas when
Hughes called upon you!”
“And have all that crew jump on me? Thank you!” said Ray.
“You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew,” said Kane.
“I don’t know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he
is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn’t help feeling to-day
how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they
are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward
difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David’s were
very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying
themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don’t like being spoken to
in meeting?”
“No, I don’t,” said Ray, bluntly.
“I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don’t think
poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly
feels that he’s got to hurry, if he’s going to have the kingdom of
heaven on earth in his time; and he wants every one to lend a hand.”
For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his
wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked
stiffly: “Couldn’t he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn’t
be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?”
“No, I don’t know that he could,” said Kane, with a pensive singleness
rare in him. “Any help of that kind would mean dependence, and David
Hughes is proud.”
They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the
viaduct carrying the northern railways; one of its noble arches opened
before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent was
like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open
fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with
the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a
spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old
cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies
of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stableyard; a
shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped
behind its dusty, leafless vines.
“He might be got into that,” said Kane, whimsically, “at no increase of
rent, and at much increase of comfort and quiet--at least till the
Afreet began to get in his work.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather too much like that eremitism which he’s so down
on?” asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.
“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would,” Kane consented, as they struck
across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and
there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in
the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the
little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks;
the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens
the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.
“I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitage somewhere--a
co-operative hermitage, I suppose,” Ray went on. He did not feel bound
to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone.
“Ah, yes,” said Kane. “What did you make of the son-in-law?”
“I don’t know. He’s a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke
of his work.”
“Why, it’s rather a romantic story, I believe,” said Kane. “He was a
young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he
was going to find work; he’s a wood-engraver. I believe he’s always had
the notion that the world was out of kilter, and it seems that he wasn’t
very well himself when he looked in on the Family to see what they were
doing to help it. He fell sick on their hands, and the Hugheses took
care of him. Naturally, he married one of them when he got well enough,
and naturally he married the wrong one.”
“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is
hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man”--
Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “_His_ notion of what
the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it
would be all serene.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are
essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to
be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to
time.”
“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a
little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and
with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any
inconsistency, serious or unserious.
“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this
kind--the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I
object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and
cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions.
But ordered Nature--the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and
seedtime and harvest”--
“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still
souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to,
about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to
rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps
in Wall Street.”
“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for
my second series of _Hard Sayings_.”
“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”
“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow
to the gifted author of _A New Romeo_. Is that what you call it?”
Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:
“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of truth. I don’t
justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles,
caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her _she_. But I don’t think that,
with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to
have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad
faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience,
in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the
justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find
them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and
we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why
not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane
broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I
hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our
noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find
it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who
want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm
across Ray’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are
you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been
imagining something of the kind.”
“Oh, no”--Ray began.
“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane.
“Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm
of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I
_couldn’t_ go. I forgot how repugnant the golden age has always been to
the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The
fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take
you away.”
He laughed, and Ray, more reluctantly, laughed with him.
“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful
point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t
it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could
tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I
should recognize that of forty years ago. I”--
He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of
the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were
heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round
haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.
“Perhaps _that_ is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the
wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours
was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the
condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a
little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes
than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me
the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the
detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am
not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a
gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan
Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be
delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty
step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for
your welcome.”
Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t. You must excuse
me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But”--
“You don’t trust me!”
“Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t feel quite up to meeting people just now;
I’ll push on down town. I’m rather tired. Good-by.”
Kane held his hand between both his palms. “I wonder what the real
reason is! Is it grudge, or pride, or youth?”
“Neither,” said Ray. “It’s--clothes. My boots are muddy, and I’ve got on
my second-best trousers.”
“Ah, now you are frank with me, and you give me a real reason. Perhaps
you are right. I dare say I should have thought so once.”