From one phase of his experience with his story, Ray took a hint, and
made bold to ask Mr. Brandreth if he could not give him some manuscripts
to read; he had rather a fancy for playing the part of some other man’s
destiny since he could have so little to do with deciding his own.
Chapley & Co. had not much work of that kind to give, but they turned
over a number of novels to him, and he read them with a jealous
interest; he wished first of all to find whether other people were
writing better novels than his, and he hoped to find that they were not.
Mostly, they really were not, and they cumulatively strengthened him
against an impulse which he had more than once had to burn his
manuscript. From certain of the novels he read he got instruction both
of a positive and negative kind; for it was part of his business to look
at their construction, and he never did this without mentally revising
the weak points of his story, and considering how he could repair them.
There was not a great deal of money in this work; but Ray got ten or
fifteen dollars for reading a manuscript and rendering an opinion of it,
and kept himself from the depravation of waiting for the turn of the
cards. He waited for nothing; he worked continually, and he filled up
the intervals of the work that was given to him with work that he made
for himself. He wrote all sorts of things,--essays, stories, sketches,
poems,--and sent them about to the magazines and the weekly newspapers
and the syndicates. When the editors were long in reporting upon them,
he went and asked for a decision; and in audacious moments he carried
his manuscript to them, and tried to surprise an instant judgment from
them. This, if it were in the case of a poem, or a very short sketch, he
could sometimes get; and it was usually adverse, as it usually was in
the case of the things he sent them by mail. They were nowhere unkindly;
they were often sympathetic, and suggested that what was not exactly
adapted to their publications might be adapted to the publication of a
fellow-editor; they were willing to sacrifice one another in his behalf.
They did not always refuse his contributions. Kane, who witnessed his
struggles at this period with an interest which he declared truly
paternal, was much struck by the fact that Ray’s failures and successes
exactly corresponded to those of business men; that is, he failed
ninety-five times out of a hundred to get his material printed. His
effort was not of the vast range suggested by these numbers; he had a
few manuscripts that were refused many times over, and made up the large
sum of his rejections by the peculiar disfavor that followed them.
Besides these regular attacks on the literary periodicals, Ray carried
on guerilla operations of several sorts. He sold jokes at two dollars
apiece to the comic papers; it sometimes seemed low for jokes, but the
papers paid as much for a poor joke as a good one, and the market was
steady. He got rather more for jokes that were ordered of him, as when
an editor found himself in possession of an extremely amusing
illustration without obvious meaning. He developed a facility wholly
unexpected to himself in supplying the meaning for a picture of this
kind; if it were a cartoon, he had the courage to ask as much as five
dollars for his point.
A mere accident opened up another field of industry to him, when one day
a gentleman halted him at the foot of the stairway to an elevated
station, and after begging his pardon for first mistaking him for a
Grand Army man, professed himself a journalist in momentary difficulty.
“I usually sell my things to the _Sunday Planet_, but my last poem was
too serious for their F. S., and I’m down on my luck. Of course, I see
_now_,” said the journalist in difficulty, “that you _couldn’t_ have
been in the war; at first glance I took you for an old comrade of mine;
but if you’ll leave your address with me--Thank you, sir! Thank you!”
Ray had put a quarter in his hand, and he thought he had bought the
right to ask him a question.
“I know that I may look twice my age when people happen to see double”--
“Capital!” said the veteran. “First-rate!” and he clapped Ray on the
shoulder, and then clung to him long enough to recover his balance.
“But _would_ you be good enough to tell me what the F. S. of the _Sunday
Planet_ is?”
“Why, the Funny Side--the page where they put the jokes and the comic
poetry. F. S. for short. Brevity is the soul of wit, you know.”
Ray hurried home and put together some of the verses that had come back
to him from the comic papers, and mailed them to the _Sunday Planet_. He
had learned not to respect his work the less for being rejected, but the
_Planet_ did not wane in his esteem because the editor of the F. S.
accepted all his outcast verses. The pay was deplorably little, however,
and for the first time he was tempted to consider an offer of
partnership with a gentleman who wrote advertisements for a living, and
who, in the falterings of his genius from overwork, had professed
himself willing to share his honors and profits with a younger man; the
profits, at any rate, were enormous.
But this temptation endured only for a moment of disheartenment. In all
his straits Ray not only did his best, but he kept true to a certain
ideal of himself as an artist. There were some things he could not do
even to make a living. He might sell anything he wrote, and he might
write anything within the bounds of honesty that would sell, but he
could not sell his pen, or let it for hire, to be used as the lessee
wished. It was not the loftiest grade of æsthetics or ethics, and
perhaps the distinctions he made were largely imaginary. But he refused
the partnership offered him, though it came with a flattering
recognition of his literary abilities, and of his peculiar fitness for
the work proposed.
He got to know a good many young fellows who were struggling forward on
the same lines with himself, and chancing it high and low with the great
monthlies, where they offered their poems and short stories, and with
the one-cent dailies, where they turned in their space-work. They had a
courage in their risks which he came to share in its gayety, if not its
irreverence, and he enjoyed the cheerful cynicism with which they
philosophized the facts of the newspaper side of their trade: they had
studied its average of successes and failures, and each of them had his
secret for surprising the favor of the managing editor, as infallible as
the gambler’s plan for breaking the bank at Monaco.
“You don’t want to be serious,” one blithe spirit volunteered for Ray’s
instruction in a moment of defeat; “you want to give a light and
cheerful cast to things. For instance, if a fireman loses his life in a
burning building, you mustn’t go straight for the reader’s pity; you
must appeal to his sense of the picturesque. You must call it, ‘Knocked
out in a Fight with Fire,’ or something like that, and treat the
incident with mingled pathos and humor. If you’ve got a case of suicide
by drowning, all you’ve got to do is to call it ‘Launch of one more
Unfortunate,’ and the editor is yours. Go round and make studies of our
metropolitan civilization; write up the ‘Leisure Moments of Surface-Car
Conductors,’ or ‘Talks with the Ticket-Choppers.’ Do the amateur
scavenger, and describe the ‘Mysteries of the Average Ash-Barrel.’”
As the time wore on, the circle of Ray’s acquaintance widened so much
that he no longer felt those pangs of homesickness which used to seize
him whenever he got letters from Midland. He rather neglected his
correspondence with Sanderson; the news of parties and sleigh-rides and
engagements and marriages which his friend wrote, affected him like
echoes from some former life. He was beginning to experience the
fascination of the mere city, where once he had a glimpse of the
situation fleeting and impalpable as those dream-thoughts that haunt the
consciousness on the brink of sleep. Then it was as if all were driving
on together, no one knew why or whither; but some had embarked on the
weird voyage to waste, and some to amass; their encounter formed the
opportunity of both, and a sort of bewildered kindliness existed between
them. Their common ignorance of what it was all for was like a bond, and
they clung involuntarily together in their unwieldy multitude because of
the want of meaning, and prospered on, suffered on, through vast
cyclones of excitement that whirled them round and round, and made a
kind of pleasant drunkenness in their brains, and consoled them for
never resting and never arriving.
The fantastic vision passed, and Ray again saw himself and those around
him full of distinctly intended effort, each in his sort, and of
relentless energy, which were self-sufficing and self-satisfying. Most
of the people he knew were, like himself, bent upon getting a story, or
a poem, or an essay, or an article, printed in some magazine or
newspaper, or some book into the hands of a publisher. They were all,
like himself, making their ninety-five failures out of a hundred
endeavors; but they were all courageous, if they were not all gay, and
if they thought the proportion of their failures disastrous, they said
nothing to show it. They did not try to blink them, but they preferred
to celebrate their successes; perhaps the rarity of these merited it
more.