Mr. Brandreth tried hard to escape from the logic of his readers’
opinions. In the light of his friendly optimism they took almost a
favorable cast. He argued that there was nothing absolutely damnatory in
those verdicts, that they all more or less tacitly embodied a
recommendation to mercy. So far his personal kindliness carried him, but
beyond this point business put up her barrier. He did not propose to
take the book in spite of his readers; he said he would see; and after
having seen for a week longer, he returned the MS. with a letter
assuring Ray of his regret, and saying that if he could modify the story
according to the suggestions of their readers, Chapley & Co. would be
pleased to examine it again.
Ray had really expected some such answer as this, though he hoped
against reason for something different. In view of it he had spent the
week mentally recasting the story in this form and in that; sometimes it
yielded to his efforts in one way or another; when the manuscript came
into his hands again, he saw that it was immutably fixed in the terms he
had given it, and that it must remain essentially what it was, in spite
of any external travesty.
He offered Mr. Brandreth his thanks and his excuses for not trying to
make any change in it until he had first offered it as it was to other
publishers. He asked if it would shut him out of Chapley & Co.’s grace
if he were refused elsewhere, and received an answer of the most
flattering cordiality to the effect that their desire to see the work in
another shape was quite unconditioned. Mr. Brandreth seemed to have put
a great deal of heart in this answer; it was most affectionately
expressed; it closed with the wish that he might soon see Ray at his
house again.
Ray could not have believed, but for the experience which came to him,
that there could be so many reasons for declining to publish any one
book as the different publishers now gave him. For the most part they
deprecated the notion of even looking at it. The book-trade had never
been so prostrate before; events of the most unexpected nature had
conspired to reduce it to a really desperate condition. The unsettled
state of Europe had a good deal to do with it; the succession of bad
seasons at the West affected it most distinctly. The approach of a
Presidential year was unfavorable to this sensitive traffic. Above all,
the suspense created by the lingering and doubtful fate of the
international copyright bill was playing havoc with it; people did not
know what course to take; it was impossible to plan any kind of
enterprise, or to risk any sort of project. Men who had been quite
buoyant in regard to the bill seemed carried down to the lowest level of
doubt as to its fate by the fact that Ray had a novel to offer them;
they could see no hope for American fiction, if that English trash was
destined to flood the market indefinitely. They sympathized with him,
but they said they were all in the same boat, and that the only thing
was to bring all the pressure each could to bear upon Congress. The sum
of their counsel and condolence came to the effect in Ray’s mind that
his best hope was to get _A Modern Romeo_ printed by Congress as a
Public Document and franked by the Senators and Representatives to their
constituents. He found a melancholy amusement in noting the change in
the mood of those who used to meet him cheerfully and carelessly as the
correspondent of a newspaper, and now found themselves confronted with
an author, and felt his manuscript at their throats. Some tried to joke;
some became helplessly serious; some sought to temporize.
Those whose circumstances and engagements forbade them even to look at
his novel were the easiest to bear with. They did not question the
quality or character of his work; they had no doubt of its excellence,
and they had perfect faith in its success; but simply their hands were
so full they could not touch it. The other sort, when they consented to
examine the story, kept it so long that Ray could not help forming false
hopes of the outcome; or else they returned it with a precipitation that
mortified his pride, and made him sceptical of their having looked into
it at all. He did not experience unconditional rejection everywhere. In
some cases the readers proposed radical and impossible changes, as
Chapley & Co.’s readers had done. In one instance they so far
recommended it that the publisher was willing to lend his imprint and
manage the book for the per cent usually paid to authors, if Ray would
meet all the expenses. There was an enthusiast who even went so far as
to propose that he would publish it if Ray would pay the cost of the
electrotype plates. He appeared to think this a handsome offer, and Ray
in fact found it so much better than nothing that he went into some
serious estimates upon it. He called in the help of old Kane, who was an
expert in the matter of electrotyping, and was able from his sad
experience to give him the exact figures. They found that _A New Romeo_
would make some four hundred and thirty or forty pages, and that at the
lowest price the plates would cost more than three hundred dollars. The
figure made Ray gasp; the mere thought of it impoverished him. His
expenses had already eaten a hundred dollars into his savings beyond the
five dollars a week he had from the _Midland Echo_ for his letters. If
he paid out this sum for his plates, he should now have some ninety
dollars left.
“But then,” said Kane, arching his eyebrows, “the trifling sum of three
hundred dollars, risked upon so safe a venture as _A New Romeo_, will
probably result in riches beyond the dreams of avarice.”
“Yes: or it may result in total loss,” Ray returned.
“It is a risk. But what was it you have been asking all these other
people to do? One of them turns and asks you to share the risk with him;
he asks you to risk less than half on a book that you have written
yourself, and he will risk the other half. What just ground have you for
refusing his generous offer?”
“It isn’t my business to publish books; it’s my business to write them,”
said Ray, coldly.
“Ah-h-h! Very true! That is a solid position. Then all you have to do to
make it quite impregnable is to write such books that other men will be
eager to take all the risks of publishing them. It appears that in the
present case you omitted to do that.” Kane watched Ray’s face with
whimsical enjoyment. “I was afraid you were putting your reluctance upon
the moral ground, and that you were refusing to bet on your book because
you thought it wrong to bet.”
“I’m afraid,” said Ray, dejectedly, “that the moral question didn’t
enter with me. If people thought it wrong to make bets of that kind, it
seems to me that all business would come to a standstill.”
“‘Sh!” said Kane, putting his finger to his lip, and glancing round with
burlesque alarm. “This is open incivism. It is accusing the whole
framework of commercial civilization. Go on; it’s delightful to hear
you; but don’t let any one _over_hear you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ray, with sullen resentment, “about
incivism. I’m saying what everybody knows.”
“Ah! But what everybody _knows_ is just what nobody _says_. If people
said what they knew, society would tumble down like a house of cards.”
Ray was silent, far withdrawn from these generalities into his personal
question.
Kane asked compassionately, “Then you think you can’t
venture--risk--chance it? Excuse me! I was trying to find a euphemism
for the action, but there seems none!”
“No; I daren’t do it! The risk is too great.”
“That seems to be the consensus of the book trade concerning it. Perhaps
you are right. _Would_ you mind,” asked Kane with all his sweet
politeness, “letting me take your manuscript home, and go over it
carefully?”
“_Let_ you!” Ray began in a rapture of gratitude, but Kane stopped him.
“No, no! Don’t expect anything! _Don’t_ form any hopes. Simply suppose
me to be reading it as a lover of high-class fiction, with no ulterior
view whatever. I am really the feeblest of conies, and I have not even
the poor advantage of having my habitation in the rocks. Good-by!
Good-day! Don’t try to stop me with civilities! Heaven knows how far my
noble purpose will hold if it is weakened by any manner of delay.”
Ray lived a day longer in the flimsiest air-castles that ever the
vagrant winds blew through. In the evening Kane came back with his
story.
“Well, my dear young friend, you have certainly produced the despair of
criticism in this extraordinary fiction of yours. I don’t wonder all the
readers have been of so many minds about it. I only wonder that any one
man could be of any one mind about it long enough to get himself down
on paper. In some respects it is the very worst thing I ever saw, and
yet--and yet--it interested me, it held me to the end. I will make a
confession; I will tell you the truth. I took the thing home, hoping to
find justification in it for approaching a poor friend of mine who is in
the publishing line, and making him believe that his interest lay in
publishing it. But I could not bring myself to so simple an act of bad
faith. I found I should have to say to my friend, ‘Here is a novel which
might make your everlasting fortune, but most of the chances are against
it. There are twenty chances that it will fail to one that it will
succeed; just the average of failure and success in business life. You
had better take it.’ Of course he would not take it, because he could
not afford to add a special risk to the general business risk. You see?”
“I see,” said Ray, but without the delight that a case so beautifully
reasoned should bring to the logical mind. At the bottom of his heart,
though he made such an outward show of fairness and impersonality, he
was simply and selfishly emotional about his book. He could not enter
into the humor of Kane’s dramatization of the case; he tacitly accused
him of inconsistency, and possibly of envy and jealousy. It began to be
as if it were Kane alone who was keeping his book from its chance with
the public. This conception, which certainly appeared perverse to Ray at
times, was at others entirely in harmony with one of several theories of
the man. He had chilled Ray more than once by the cold cynicism of his
opinions concerning mankind at large; and now Ray asked himself why
Kane’s cynicism should not characterize his behavior towards him, too.
Such a man would find a delight in studying him in his defeat, and
turning his misery into phrases and aphorisms.
He was confirmed in his notion of Kane’s heartlessness by the strange
behavior of Mr. Brandreth, who sent for his manuscript one morning,
asking if he might keep it a few days, and then returned it the same
day, with what Ray thought an insufficient explanation of the
transaction. He proudly suffered a week under its inadequacy, and then
he went to Mr. Brandreth, and asked him just what the affair meant; it
seemed to him that he had a right to know.
Mr. Brandreth laughed in rather a shame-faced way. “I may as well make a
clean breast of it. As I told you when we first met, I’ve been wanting
to publish a novel for some time; and although I haven’t read yours, the
plot attracted me, and I thought I would give it another chance--the
best chance I could. I wanted to show it to a friend of yours--I suppose
I may say friend, at least it was somebody that I thought would be
prejudiced more in favor of it than against it; and I had made up my
mind that if the person approved of it I would read it too, and if we
agreed about it, I would get Mr. Chapley to risk it. But--I found that
the person had read it.”
“And didn’t like it.”
“I can’t say that, exactly.”
“If it comes to that,” said Ray, with a bitter smile, “it doesn’t
matter about the precise terms.” He could not speak for a moment; then
he swallowed the choking lump in his throat, and offered Brandreth his
hand. “Thank _you_, Mr. Brandreth! I’m sure _you’re_ my friend; and I
sha’n’t forget your kindness.”