With an impatience whose intensity he began to feel as soon as he
permitted himself to indulge it, Ray hurried across to the line of the
elevated road. Now he perceived how intolerable it would be to have
staid to dinner with the Brandreths. He did not resent the failure of
Mr. Brandreth to tell his wife that he had already asked him when she
asked him again; he did not even care to know what his reasons or
exigencies were; the second invitation had been a chance to get away.
From time to time while Mr. Brandreth was showing him the baby, and then
while Mrs. Chapley was setting her mind at rest about her husband by her
researches into the philosophy and character of Hughes, he had
superficially forgotten that the readers’ opinions of his story were in,
while his nether thought writhed in anguish around the question of what
their opinions were. When at moments this fully penetrated his
consciousness, it was like a sort of vertigo, and he was light-headed
with it now as he walked, or almost ran, away from Mr. Brandreth’s door.
He meant to see Miss Hughes, and beg for a sight of the criticisms;
perhaps she might say something that would save him from the worst, if
they were very bad. He imagined a perfect interview, in which he met no
one but her.
It was Mrs. Denton who stood at the head of the stairs to receive him
when the door promptly opened to his ring; she explained that her
husband had put the lock in order since she last admitted him. Ray
managed to say that he wished merely to see her sister for a moment, and
why, and she said that Peace had gone out, but would be at home again
very soon. She said her father would be glad to have him sit down with
him till Peace came back.
Ray submitted. He found the old man coughing beside the front window,
that looked out on the lines of the railroad, and the ugly avenue
beneath.
Hughes knew him at once, and called to him: “Well, young man! I am glad
to see you! How do you do?” He held out his hand when he was seated, and
when Ray had shaken it, he motioned with it to the vacant chair on the
other side of the window.
“I hope you are well, sir?” said Ray.
“I’m getting the better of this nasty cough gradually, and I pick up a
little new strength every day. Yes, I’m doing very well. For the present
I have to keep housed, and that’s tiresome. But it gives me time for a
bit of writing that I have in hand; I’m putting together the impressions
that this civilization of yours makes on me, in a little book that I
call _The World Revisited_.”
Ray did not see exactly why Hughes should say _his_ civilization, as if
he had invented it; but he did not disclaim it; and Hughes went on
without interruption from him.
“I hope to get my old friend Chapley to bring it out for me, if I can
reconcile him to its radical opinions. He’s timid, Chapley is; and my
book’s rather bold.”
Ray’s thought darted almost instantly to his own book, and ran it over
in every part, seeking whether there might be something in it that was
too bold for a timid publisher, or a timid publisher’s professional
readers. He was aware of old Hughes monologuing on with the satisfaction
of an author who speaks of his work to a listener he has at his mercy.
“My book is a criticism of modern life in all its aspects, though
necessarily as the field is so vast, I can touch on some only in the
most cursory fashion. For instance, take this whole architectural
nightmare that we call a city. I hold that the average tasteless man has
no right to realize his ideas of a house in the presence of a great
multitude of his fellow-beings. It is an indecent exposure of his mind,
and should not be permitted. All these structural forms about us, which
with scarcely an exception are ugly and senseless, I regard as so many
immoralities, as deliriums, as imbecilities, which a civilized state
would not permit, and I say so in my book. The city should build the
city, and provide every denizen with a fit and beautiful habitation to
work in and rest in.”
“I’m afraid,” said Ray, tearing his mind from his book to put it on this
proposition, “that such an idea might be found rather startling.”
“How, startling? Why, startling?” Hughes demanded.
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t it infringe upon private rights? Wouldn’t it be
a little tyrannical?”
“What private rights has a man in the outside of his house,” Hughes
retorted. “The interior might be left to his ignorance and vulgarity.
But the outside of my house is not for _me_! It’s for others! The public
sees it ten times where I see it once. If I make it brutal and stupid,
_I_ am the tyrant, _I_ am the oppressor--I, the individual! Besides,
when the sovereign people is really lord of itself, it can and will do
no man wrong.”
Ray had his misgivings, but he would not urge them, because it was a
gnawing misery to think of anything but his story, and he let Hughes
break the silence that he let follow.
“And so,” the old man said presently, as if speaking of his own book had
reminded him of Ray’s, “you have written a novel, young man. And what is
your justification for writing a novel at a time like this, when we are
all trembling on the verge of a social cataclysm?”
“Justification?” Ray faltered.
“Yes. How does it justify itself? How does it serve God and help man?
Does it dabble with the passion of love between a girl and boy as if
that were the chief concern of men and women? Or does it touch some of
the real concerns of life--some of the problems pressing on to their
solution, and needing the prayerful attention of every human creature?”
“It isn’t merely a love-story,” said Ray, glad to get to it on any
terms, “though it is a love-story. But I’ve ventured to employ a sort of
psychological motive.”
“What sort?”
“Well--hypnotism.”
“A mere toy, that Poe and Hawthorne played with in the old mesmerist
days, and I don’t know how many others.”
“I don’t play with it as they did, exactly,” said Ray.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you employ it to as new effect as the scientifics who
are playing with it again. But how can you live in this camp of
embattled forces, where luxury and misery are armed against each other,
and every lover of his kind should give heart and brain to the solution
of the riddle that is maddening brother against brother,--how can you
live on here and be content with the artistic study of hysteria?”
The strong words of the old man, which fell tingling with emotion, had
no meaning for the soul of youth in Ray; he valued them æsthetically,
but he could not make personal application of them. He had a kind of
amusement in answering: “Well, I’m not quite so bad as you think, Mr.
Hughes. I wrote my story several years ago. I don’t suppose I could do
anything of the kind, now.”
Hughes’s mouth seemed stopped for the moment by this excuse. He sat
glaring at Ray’s bright, handsome face through his overhanging, shaggy
eyebrows, and seemed waiting to gather strength for another onset, when
his daughter Peace came silently into the room behind Ray.
Her father did not give her time to greet their visitor. “Well,” he
called out with a voice of stormy pathos, “how did you leave that poor
woman?”
“She is dead,” answered the girl.
“Good!” said Hughes. “So far, so good. Who is living?”
“There are several children. The people in the house are taking care of
them.”
“Of course! There, young man,” said Hughes, “is a psychological problem
better worth your study than the phenomena of hypnotism: the ability of
poverty to provide for want out of its very destitution. The miracle of
the loaves and fishes is wrought here every day in the great
tenement-houses. Those who have nothing for themselves can still find
something for others. The direst want may be trusted to share its crust
with those who have not a crust; and still something remains, as if
Christ had blessed the bread and broken it among the famishing. Don’t
you think that an interesting and romantic fact, a mystery meriting the
attention of literary art?”
It did strike Ray as a good notion; something might be done with it, say
in a Christmas story, if you could get hold of a tenement-house incident
of that kind, and keep it from becoming allegorical in the working out.
This went through Ray’s mind as he stood thinking also how he should
ask the girl for his manuscript and the criticisms on it without seeming
foolishly eager. Her father’s formidable intervention had dispensed him
from the usual greetings, and he could only say, “Oh! Miss Hughes, Mr.
Brandreth told me I might come and get my story of you--_A Modern
Romeo_--and the readers’ opinions. I--I thought I should like to look
them over; and--and”--
“I haven’t had time to copy them yet,” she answered. “Mr. Brandreth
wished you to see them; but we keep the readers anonymous, and he
thought I had better show them to you all in my handwriting.”
“I shouldn’t know the writers. He said I could see them as they are.”
“Well, then, I will go and get them for you,” she answered. She left him
a moment, and he remained with her father unmolested. The old man sat
staring out on the avenue, with his head black against its gathering
lights.
She gave him the packet she brought back with her, and then she followed
him out of the apartment upon the landing, after he had made his
acknowledgments and adieux.
“I thought,” she said, timidly, “you would like to know that I had given
your dollar for these poor children. Was that right?”
Ray’s head was so full of his story that he answered vaguely, “My
dollar?” Then he remembered. “Oh! Oh yes! It was right--quite right! I’m
glad you did it. Miss Hughes! Excuse me; but would you mind telling me
whether you have happened to look at the story yourself?”
She hesitated, and then answered: “Yes, I’ve read it.”
“Oh, then,” he bubbled out, knowing that he was wrong and foolish, but
helpless to refrain, “before I read those things, won’t you tell me--I
should care more--I should like so much to know what _you_--I suppose
I’ve no right to ask!”
He tried to make some show of decency about the matter, but in fact he
had the heart to ask a dying man his opinion, in that literary passion
which spares nothing, and is as protean as love itself in its disguises.
“I suppose,” she answered, “that I had no right to read it; I wasn’t
asked to do it.”
“Oh, yes, you had. I’m very glad you did.”
“The opinions about it were so different that I couldn’t help looking at
it, and then--I kept on,” she said.
“Were they so _very_ different?” he asked, trembling with his author’s
sensitiveness, while the implication of praise in her confession worked
like a frenzied hope in his brain. “And you kept on? Then it interested
you?”
She did not answer this question, but said: “None of them thought just
alike about it. But you’ll see them”--
“No, no! Tell me what you thought of it yourself! Was there some part
that seemed better than the rest?”
She hesitated. “No, I would rather not say. I oughtn’t to have told you
I had read it.”
“You didn’t like it!”
“Yes; I did like parts of it. But I musn’t say any more.”
“But what parts?” he pleaded.
“You mustn’t ask me. The readers’ opinions”--
“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely.
“What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd!
But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s
the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve
had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it
around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly
bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you
approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to
bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic? _Romeo and
Juliet_ is melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous
about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself
away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time
writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve
quite lost the sense of it. I don’t believe I can make head or tail of
those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you
thought of it yourself.”
“But I have no right to do that. It would be interfering with other
people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded.
“I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your
pardon. Good-night!”
He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat
upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he
read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him,
and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have
had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit
which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less.
Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the
poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each
read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not
every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they
all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one
another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the
whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude
realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions
which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different.
Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A
third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern
circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a
clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest
through a prevailing fad. A fifth touched upon the obvious imitation of
Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of
having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.
Ray resented, with a keen sense of personal affront, these criticisms in
severalty, but their combined effect was utter humiliation, though they
were less true taken together than they were separately. At the bottom
of his sore and angry heart he could not deny their truth, and yet he
knew that there was something in his book which none of them had taken
account of, and that this was its life, which had come out of his own.
He was aware of all those crude and awkward and affected things, but he
believed there was something, too, that went with them, and that had not
been in fiction before.
It was this something which he hoped that girl had felt in his story,
and which he was trying to get her to own to him before he looked at the
opinions. They confounded and distracted him beyond his foreboding even,
and it was an added anguish to keep wondering, as he did all night,
whether she had really found anything more in the novel than his critics
had. As he turned from side to side and beat his pillow into this shape
and that, he reconstructed the story after one critic’s suggestion, and
then after another’s; but the material only grew more defiant and
impossible; if it could not keep the shape it had, it would take no
other. That was plain; and the only thing to be done was to throw it
away, and write something else; for it was not reasonable to suppose
that Mr. Brandreth would think of bringing the book out in the teeth of
all these adverse critics. But now he had no heart to think of anything
else, although he was always thinking of something else, while there was
hope of getting this published. His career as an author was at an end;
he must look about for some sort of newspaper work; he ought to be very
glad if he could get something to do as a space man.