Peace did not come back to her work at the publishers’ for several
weeks. The arrears began to accumulate, and Mr. Brandreth asked Ray to
help look after it; Ray was now so often with him that their friendly
acquaintance had become a confidential intimacy.
Men’s advance in these relations is rapid, even in later life; in youth
it is by bounds. Before a week of their daily contact was out, Ray knew
that Mrs. Chapley, though the best soul in the world, and the most
devoted of mothers and grandmothers, had, in Mr. Brandreth’s opinion, a
bad influence on his wife, and through her on his son. She excited Mrs.
Brandreth by the long visits she paid her; and she had given the baby
medicine on one occasion at least that distinctly had not agreed with
it. “That boy has taken so much belladonna, as a preventive of scarlet
fever, that I believe it’s beginning to affect his eyes. The pupils are
tremendously enlarged, and he doesn’t notice half as much as he did a
month ago. I don’t know when Mrs. Chapley will let us have Miss Hughes
back again. Of course, I believe in taking precautions too, and I never
could forgive myself if anything really happened. But I don’t want to be
a perfect slave to my fears, or my mother-in-law’s, either--should
you?”
He asked Ray whether, under the circumstances, he did not think he ought
to get some little place near New York for the summer, rather than go to
his country home in Massachusetts, where the Chapleys had a house, and
where his own mother lived the year round. When Ray shrank from the
question as too personal for him to deal with, Mr. Brandreth invited him
to consider the more abstract proposition that if the two grandmothers
had the baby there to quarrel over all summer, they would leave nothing
of the baby, and yet would not part friends.
“I’ll tell you another reason why I want to be near my business so as to
keep my finger on it all the time, this year,” said Mr. Brandreth, and
he went into a long and very frank study of the firm’s affairs with Ray,
who listened with the discreet intelligence which made everybody trust
him. “With Mr. Chapley in the state he’s got into about business, when
he doesn’t care two cents whether school keeps or not, I see that I’ve
got to take the reins more and more into my own hands.” Mr. Brandreth
branched off into an examination of his own character, and indirectly
paid himself some handsome tributes as a business man. “I don’t mean to
say,” he concluded, “that I’ve got the experience of some of the older
men, but I do mean to say that experience doesn’t count for half of what
they claim, in the book business, and I can prove it out of their own
mouths. They all admit that nobody can forecast the fate of a book. Of
course if you’ve got a book by a known author, you’ve got something to
count on, but not so much as people think, and some unknown man may
happen along with a thing that hits the popular mood and outsell him ten
times over. It’s a perfect lottery.”
“I wonder they let you send your lists of new publications through the
mails,” said Ray, dryly.
“Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Though there
are a good many blanks too. I suppose the moral difference between
business and gambling is that in business you do work for a living, and
you don’t propose to give nothing for something, even when you’re buying
as cheap as you can to sell as dear as you can. With a book it’s even
better. It’s something you’ve put value into, and you have a right to
expect to get value out of it. That’s what I tell Mr. Chapley when he
gets into one of his Tolstoï moods, and wants to give his money to the
poor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”
The two young men laughed at these grotesque conceptions of duty, and
Mr. Brandreth went on:
“Yes, sir, if I could get hold of a good, strong, lively novel”--
“Well, there is always _A Modern Romeo_,” Ray suggested.
Mr. Brandreth winced. “I know.” He added, with the effect of hurrying to
get away from the subject, “I’ve had it over and over again with Mr.
Chapley till I’m tired of it. Well, I suppose it’s his age, somewhat,
too. Every man, when he gets to Mr. Chapley’s time of life, wants to go
into the country and live on the land. I’d like to see him living on the
land in Hatboro’, Massachusetts! You can stand up in your buggy and
count half-a-dozen abandoned farms wherever you’ve a mind to stop on the
road. By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, from an association of ideas that
Ray easily followed, “have you seen anything of the book that Mr. Hughes
is writing? He’s got a good title for it. ‘The World Revisited’ ought to
sell the first edition of it at a go.”
“Before people found out what strong meat it was? It condemns the whole
structure of society; he’s read me parts of it.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Brandreth, in a certain perplexity, “that might
make it go too. People like strong meat. They like to have the structure
of society condemned. There’s a good deal of sympathy with the
underpinning; there’s no use trying to deny it. Confound it! I should
like to try such a book as that in the market. But it would be regarded
by everybody who knew him as an outcome of Mr. Chapley’s Tolstoï twist.”
“I understand that Mr. Hughes’s views are entirely opposed to Tolstoï’s.
He regards him as unpractical,” said Ray, with a smile for Hughes’s
practicality.
“It wouldn’t make any difference. They would call it Tolstoïan on Mr.
Chapley’s account. People don’t know. There was _Looking Backward_; they
took that at a gulp, and didn’t know that it was the rankest sort of
socialism. My! If I could get hold of a book like _Looking Backward_!”
“I might have it come out that the wicked cousin in _A Modern Romeo_ was
a secret Anarchist. That ought to make the book’s fortune.”
Ray could deal lightly with his rejected novel, but even while he made
an open jest of it, the book was still inwardly dear to him. He still
had his moments of thinking it a great book, in places. He was always
mentally comparing it with other novels that came out, and finding it
better. He could not see why they should have got publishers, and his
book not; he had to fall back upon that theory of mere luck which first
so emboldens and then so embitters the heart; and the hope that lingered
in him was mixed with cynicism.