The disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough
simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then
crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It
was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it
into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced
leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience.
One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye
on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he
pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have
liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though
the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they
met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge
if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described
the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in
his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of
self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place
which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted
with that part of his poem, and cut it out.
As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to
some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies
neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray
did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps
it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less
recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration
in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.
When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a
fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss
Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign
that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning
her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only
discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having
indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did
not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which
he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was
now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it
lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he
put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.
The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their
apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was
provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.
“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when
you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon
you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my
eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have
forgiven me by eating salt with us?”
“There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray,” Mrs. Denton called
gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and
set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high
chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a
knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to
drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.
There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was
tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father’s table, and
he thought it good enough, even after several years’ sophistication in
cities.
“There was to have been steak,” Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look
at her husband, “but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away
his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn’t want any steak.”
Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and
he asked vaguely, “What did he see?”
“Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their
rent. I think that after this, when Ansel won’t come home by the
Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some
good from the exercise. He won’t see families set out on the sidewalk in
Fifth Avenue.”
Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating
glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and
Denton said: “The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better.
If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves”--
“Oh, I don’t call salt and potatoes luxury,” exactly, said his wife.
Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the
helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his
sadness. “I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back
rent,” he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent
again.
Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was
some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were
not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain
point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms
again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. “I
recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his
blessing.”
“Did he look as if he had got rich begging?” Denton asked.
“No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working,” Ray
answered, neatly.
Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it
would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.
“You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average
laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”
Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery.
“Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the
lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to
the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”
“Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars
to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”
“No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with
an imperfect hold of her irony.
“There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to
retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”
“I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. “I wish they would
swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets
of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show
him what his wealth was based on.”
“It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality.
The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would
begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He
would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not
take the chance of suffering for himself and his family by relieving
the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”
“In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no
chance of suffering.”
“No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest
of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole
world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in
what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”
He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript,
father,” and brought it to him.
The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s
unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his
poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When
he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while
Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen
asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and
bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from
their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering
faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his
affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the
movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.
“Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.
“Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith
in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if
there was anything to go back to.”
Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in
deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem
to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so
much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent,
and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him.
Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions.
What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better
pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He
never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”
“Then I don’t see why he objects to the new processes,” said Ray, with
the heartlessness which so easily passes for wit. Peace looked at him
with grave surprise.
Mrs. Denton laughed over the cat which had got up in her lap. “That’s
what I tell him. But it doesn’t satisfy him.”
“You know,” said the younger sister, with a reproach in her tone, which
brought Ray sensibly under condemnation, too, “that he means that art
must be free before it can be true, and that there can be no freedom
where there is the fear of want.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, turning her head for a new effect of the
sleeping cat, “there was no fear of want in the Family; but there
wasn’t much art, either.”
Ray was tempted to laugh, but he wanted above all to read his poem, and
to lead up to it without delay, and he denied himself the pleasure of a
giggle with Mrs. Denton. “I suppose,” he said, “the experiment of
emancipation is tried on too small a scale in a community.”
“That is what father thinks,” said Peace. “That is why he wants the
whole world to be free.”
“Yes,” said Ray, aware of a relenting in her towards himself; and he
added, with apparent inconsequence: “Perhaps it would help forward the
time for it if every artist could express his feeling about it, or
represent it somehow.”
“I don’t see exactly how they could in a picture or a statue,” said Mrs.
Denton.
“No,” Ray assented from the blind alley where he had unexpectedly
brought up. He broke desperately from it, and said, more toward Peace
than toward her sister, “I have been trying to turn my own little
disappointment into poetry. You know,” he added, “that Chapley & Co.
have declined my book?”
“Yes,” she admitted, with a kind of shyness.
“I wonder,” and here Ray took the manuscript out of his pocket, “whether
you would let me read you some passages of my poem.”
Mrs. Denton assented eagerly, and Peace less eagerly, but with an
interest that was enough for him. Before he began to read, Mrs. Denton
said a number of things that seemed suddenly to have accumulated in her
mind, mostly irrelevant; she excused herself for leaving the room, and
begged Ray to wait till she came back. Several times during the reading
she escaped and returned; the poet finished in one of her absences.