“You see,” Ray said, “it’s merely a fragment.” He wiped the perspiration
from his forehead.
“Of course,” the girl answered, with a sigh. “Isn’t disappointment
always fragmentary?” she asked, sadly.
“How do you mean?”
“Why, happiness is like something complete; and disappointment like
something broken off, to me. A story that ends well seems rounded; and
one that ends badly leaves you waiting, as you do just after some one
dies.”
“Is that why you didn’t like my story?” Ray asked, imprudently. He added
quickly, at an embarrassment which came into her face, “Oh, I didn’t
mean to add to my offence! I came here partly to excuse it. I was too
persistent the other night.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, I was. I had no right to an opinion from you. I knew it at the
time, but I couldn’t help it. You were right to refuse. But you can tell
me how my poem strikes you. It isn’t offered for publication!”
He hoped that she would praise some passages that he thought fine; but
she began to speak of the motive, and he saw that she had not missed
anything, that she had perfectly seized his intention. She talked to
him of it as if it were the work of some one else, and he said
impulsively, “If I had you to criticise my actions beforehand, I should
not be so apt to make a fool of myself.”
Mrs. Denton came back. “I ran off toward the last. I didn’t want to be
here when Peace began to criticise. She’s so severe.”
“She hasn’t been at all severe this time,” said Ray.
“I don’t see how she could be,” Mrs. Denton returned. “All that I heard
was splendid.”
“It’s merely a fragment,” said Ray, with grave satisfaction in her
flattery.
“You must finish it, and read us the rest of it.”
Ray looked at Peace, and something in her face made him say, “I shall
never finish it; it isn’t worth it.”
“Did Peace say that?”
“No.”
Mrs. Denton laughed. “That’s just like Peace. She makes other people say
the disagreeable things she thinks about them.”
“What a mysterious power!” said Ray. “Is it hypnotic suggestion?”
He spoke lightly toward Peace, but her sister answered: “Oh, we’re full
of mysteries in this house. Did you know that my husband had a Voice?”
“A voice! Is a voice mysterious?”
“This one is. It’s an internal Voice. It tells him what to do.”
“Oh, like the demon of Socrates.”
“I _hope_ it isn’t a demon!” said Mrs. Denton.
“That depends upon what it tells him to do,” said Ray. “In Socrates’ day
a familiar spirit could be a demon without being at all bad. How proud
you must be to have a thing like that in the family!”
“I don’t know. It has its inconveniences, sometimes. When it tells him
to do what we don’t want him to,” said Mrs. Denton.
“Oh, but think of the compensations!” Ray urged. “Why, it’s equal to a
ghost.”
“I suppose it is a kind of ghost,” said Mrs. Denton, and Ray fancied she
had the pride we all feel in any alliance, direct or indirect, with the
supernatural. “Do you believe in dreams?” she asked abruptly.
“Bad ones, I do,” said Ray. “We always expect bad dreams and dark
presentiments to come true, don’t we!”
“I don’t know. My husband does. He has a Dream as well as a Voice.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Ray; and he added: “I see. The Voice is the one he
talks with in his sleep.”
The flippant suggestion amused Mrs. Denton; but a shadow of pain came
over Peace’s face, that made Ray wish to get away from the mystery he
had touched; she might be a believer in it, or ashamed of it.
“I wonder,” he added, “why we never expect our day-dreams to come true?”
“Perhaps because they’re never bad ones--because we know we’re just
making them,” said Mrs. Denton.
“It must be that! But, do we always make them? Sometimes my day-dreams
seem to make themselves, and they keep on doing it so long that they
tire me to death. They’re perfect daymares.”
“How awful! The only way would be to go to sleep, if you wanted to get
rid of them.”
“Yes; and that isn’t so easy as waking up. Anybody can wake up; a man
can wake up to go to execution; but it takes a very happy man to go to
sleep.”
The recognition of this fact reminded Ray that he was himself a very
unhappy man; he had forgotten it for the time.
“He might go into society and get rid of them that way,” Mrs. Denton
suggested, with an obliquity which he was too simply masculine to
perceive. “I suppose you go into society a good deal, Mr. Ray?”
Peace made a little movement as of remonstrance, but she did not speak,
and Ray answered willingly: “_I_ go into society? I have been inside of
just one house--or flat--besides this, since I came to New York.”
“Why!” said Mrs. Denton.
She seemed to be going to say something more, but she stopped at a look
from her sister, and left Ray free to so on or not, as he chose. He told
them it was Mr. Brandreth’s flat he had been in; at some little hints of
curiosity from Mrs. Denton, he described it to her.
“I have some letters from people in Midland, but I haven’t presented
them yet,” he added at the end. “The Brandreths are all I know of
society.”
“They’re much more than we know. Well, it seems like fairyland,” said
Mrs. Denton, in amiable self-derision. “I used to think that was the way
we should live when we left the Family. I suppose there are people in
New York that would think it was like fairyland to live like us, and not
all in one room. Ansel is always preaching that when I grumble.”
The cat sprang up into her lap, and she began to smooth its long flank,
and turn her head from side to side, admiring its enjoyment.
“Well,” Ray said, “whatever we do, we are pretty sure to be sorry we
didn’t do something else.”
He was going to lead up to his own disappointments by this commonplace,
but Mrs. Denton interposed.
“Oh, I’m not sorry we left the Family, if that’s what you mean. There’s
some chance, here, and there everything went by rule; you had your share
of the work, and you knew just what you had to expect every day. I used
to say I wished something _wrong_ would happen, just so as to have
_something_ happen. I believe it was more than half that that got father
out, too,” she said, with a look at her sister.
“I thought,” said Ray, “but perhaps I didn’t understand him, that your
father wanted to make the world over on the image of your community.”
“I guess he wanted to have the fun of chancing it, too,” said Mrs.
Denton. “Of course he wants to make the world over, but he has a pretty
good time as it is; and I’m glad of all I did and said to get him into
it. He had no chance to bring his ideas to bear on it in the Family.”
“Then it was you who got him out of the community,” said Ray.
“I did my best,” said Mrs. Denton. “But I can’t say I did it,
altogether.”
“Did you help?” he asked Peace.
“I wished father to do what he thought was right. He had been doubtful
about the life there for a good while--whether it was really doing
anything for humanity.”
She used the word with no sense of cant in it; Ray could perceive that.
“And do you ever wish you were back in the Family?”
Mrs. Denton called out joyously: “Why, there is no Family to be back in,
I’m thankful to say! Didn’t you know that?”
“I forgot.” Ray smiled, as he pursued, “Well, if there was one to be
back in, would you like to be there, Miss Hughes?”
“I can’t tell,” she answered, with a trouble in her voice. “When I’m not
feeling very strong or well, I should. And when I see so many people
struggling so hard here, and failing after all they do, I wish they
could be where there was no failure, and no danger of it. In the Family
we were safe, and we hadn’t any care.”
“We hadn’t any choice, either,” said her sister.
“What choice has a man who doesn’t know where the next day’s work is
coming from?”
Ray looked round to find that Denton had entered behind them from the
room where he had been, and was sitting beside the window apparently
listening to their talk. There was something uncanny in the fact of his
unknown presence, though neither of the sisters seemed to feel it.
“Oh, you’re there,” said Mrs. Denton, without turning from her cat.
“Well, I suppose that’s a question that must come home to you more and
more. Did you ever hear of such a dreadful predicament as my husband’s
in, Mr. Ray? He’s just hit on an invention that’s going to make us rich,
and throw all the few remaining engravers out of work, when he gets it
finished.” Her husband’s face clouded, but she went on: “His only hope
is that the invention will turn out a failure. You don’t have any such
complications in your work, do you, Mr. Ray?”
“No,” said Ray, thinking what a good situation the predicament would be,
in a story. “If they had taken my novel, and published an edition of
fifty thousand, I don’t see how it could have reduced a single author to
penury. But I don’t believe I could resist the advances of a publisher,
even if I knew it might throw authors out of work right and left. I
could support their families till they got something to do.”
“Yes, you might do that, Ansel,” his wife suggested, with a slanting
smile at him. “I only hope we may have the opportunity. But probably it
will be as hard to get a process accepted as a book.”
“That hasn’t anything to do with the question,” Denton broke out. “The
question is whether a man ought not to kill his creative thought as he
would a snake, if he sees that there is any danger of its taking away
work another man lives by. That is what I look at.”
“And father,” said Mrs. Denton, whimsically, “is so high-principled that
he won’t let us urge on the millenium by having pandemonium first. If we
were allowed to do that, Ansel might quiet his conscience by reflecting
that the more men he threw out of work, the sooner the good time would
come. I don’t see why that isn’t a good plan, and it would work in so
nicely with what we want to do. Just make everything so bad people
cannot bear it, and then they will rise up in their might and make it
better for themselves. Don’t you think so, Mr. Ray?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.
All this kind of thinking and feeling, which was a part and parcel of
these people’s daily life, was alien to his habit of mind. He grasped it
feebly and reluctantly, without the power or the wish to follow it to
conclusions, whether it was presented ironically by Mrs. Denton, or with
a fanatical sincerity by her husband.
“No, no! That won’t do,” Denton said. “I have tried to see that as a
possible thoroughfare; but it isn’t possible. If we were dealing with
statistics it would do; but it’s men we’re dealing with: men like
ourselves that have women and children dependent on them.”
“I am glad to hear you say that, Ansel,” Peace said, gently.
“Yes,” he returned, bitterly, “whichever way I turn, the way is barred.
My hands are tied, whatever I try to do. Some one must be responsible.
Some one must atone. Who shall it be?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, with a look of comic resignation, “it seems to
be a pretty personal thing, after all, in spite of father’s philosophy.
I always supposed that when we came into the world we should have an
election, and vote down all these difficulties by an overwhelming
majority.”
Ray quoted, musingly:
“The world is out of joint:--O cursed spite!
That ever I was born to set it right!”
“Yes? Who says that?”
“Hamlet.”
“Oh yes. Well, I feel just exactly as Ham does about it.”
Denton laughed wildly out at her saucy drolling, and she said, as if his
mirth somehow vexed her, “I should think if you’re so much troubled by
that hard question of yours, you would get your Voice to say something.”
Her husband rose, and stood looking down, while a knot gathered between
his gloomy eyes. Then he turned and left the room without answering
her.
She sent a laugh after him. “Sometimes,” she said to the others, “the
Voice doesn’t know any better than the rest of us.”
Peace remained looking gravely at her a moment, and then she followed
Denton out of the room.
Mrs. Denton began to ask Ray about Mrs. Brandreth and Mrs. Chapley,
pressing him with questions as to what kind of people they really were,
and whether they were proud; she wondered why they had never come to
call upon her. It would all have been a little vulgar if it had not been
so childlike and simple. Ray was even touched by it when he thought that
the chief concern of these ladies was to find out from him just what
sort of crank her father was, and to measure his influence for evil on
Mr. Chapley.
At the same time he heard Peace talking to Denton in a tone of entreaty
and pacification. She staid so long that Ray had risen to go when she
came back. He had hoped for a moment alone with her at parting, so that
he might renew in better form the excuses that he pretended he had come
to make. But the presence of her sister took all the seriousness and
delicacy from them; he had to make a kind of joke of them; and he could
not tell her at all of the mysterious message from Mr. Brandreth about
the friend to whom he wished to submit his book, and of the final pang
of disappointment which its immediate return had given him. He had meant
that she should say something to comfort him for this, but he had to
forego his intended consolation.