“Well, sir,” said Mr. Brandreth when he found Ray waiting for him in his
little room the next morning, “I haven’t slept a wink all night.”
Ray had not slept a wink himself, and he had not been able to keep away
from Chapley’s in his fear and his hope concerning his book. He hoped
Mr. Brandreth might have looked at it; he feared he had not. His heart
began to go down, but he paused in his despair at the smiles that Mr.
Brandreth broke into.
“It was that book of yours. I thought I would just dip into it after
dinner, and try a chapter or two on Mrs. Brandreth; but I read on till
eleven o’clock, and then she went to bed, and I kept at it till I
finished it, about three this morning. Then the baby took up the strain
for about half an hour and finished _me_.”
Ray did not know what to say. He gasped out, “I’m proud to have been
associated with young Mr. Brandreth in destroying his father’s rest.”
The publisher did not heed this poor attempt at nonchalance. “I left the
manuscript for Mrs. Brandreth--she called me back to make sure, before I
got out of doors--and if she likes it as well to the end--But I know she
will! She likes you, Ray.”
“Does she?” Ray faintly questioned back.
“Yes; she thinks you’re all kinds of a nice fellow, and that you’ve been
rather sacrificed in some ways. She thinks you behaved splendidly in
that Denton business.”
Ray remained mutely astonished at the flattering opinions of Mrs.
Brandreth; he had suspected them so little. Her husband went on,
smiling:
“She wasn’t long making out the original of your hero.” Ray blushed
consciously, but made no attempt to disown the self-portraiture. “Of
course,” said Mr. Brandreth, “we’re all in the dark about the heroine.
But Mrs. Brandreth doesn’t care so much for her.”
Now that he was launched upon the characters of the story, Mr. Brandreth
discussed them all, and went over the incidents with the author, whose
brain reeled with the ecstacy of beholding them objectively in the
flattering light of another’s appreciation.
“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, at last, when Ray found strength to rise
from this debauch of praise, “you’ll hear from me, now, very soon. I’ve
made up my mind about the story, and unless Mrs. Brandreth should hate
it very much before she gets through with it--Curious about women, isn’t
it, how they always take the personal view? I believe the main reason
why my wife dislikes your heroine is because she got her mixed up with
the girl that took the part of Juliet away from her in our out-door
theatricals. I tell her that you and I are not only the two Percys,
we’re the two Romeos, too. She thinks your heroine is rather weak; of
course you meant her to be so.”
Ray had not, but he said that he had, and he made a noisy pretence of
thinking the two Romeos a prodigious joke. His complaisance brought its
punishment.
“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, “I must tell you a singular thing that
happened. Just as I got to that place where he shoots himself, you know,
and she starts up out of her hypnotic trance, our baby gave a frightful
scream, and Mrs. Brandreth woke and thought the house was on fire. I
suppose the little fellow had a bad dream; it’s strange what dreams
babies _do_ have! But wasn’t it odd, happening when I was wrought up so?
Looks like telepathy, doesn’t it? Of course my mind’s always on the
child. By-the-way, if this thing goes, you must try a telepathic story.
It hasn’t been done yet.”
“Magnificent!” said Ray. “I’ll do it!”
They got away from each other, and Ray went down to his work at the
_Every Evening_ office. He enslaved himself to it by an effort twice as
costly as that of writing when he was in the deepest and darkest of his
despair; his hope danced before him, and there was a tumult in his
pulses which he could quiet a little only by convincing himself that as
yet he had no promise from Mr. Brandreth, and that if the baby had given
Mrs. Brandreth a bad day, it was quite within the range of possibility
that the publisher might, after all, have perfectly good reasons for
rejecting his book. He insisted with himself upon this view of the
case; it was the only one that he could steady his nerves with; and
besides, he somehow felt that if he could feign it strenuously enough,
the fates would be propitiated, and the reverse would happen.
It is uncertain whether it was his pretence that produced the result
intended, but in the evening Mr. Brandreth came down to Ray’s hotel to
say that he had made up his mind to take the book.
“We talked it over at dinner, and my wife made me come right down and
tell you. She said you had been kept in suspense long enough, and she
wasn’t going to let you go overnight. It’s the first book _we’ve_ ever
taken, and I guess she feels a little romantic about the new departure.
By-the-way, we found out what ailed the baby. It was a pin that had got
loose, and stuck up through the sheet in his crib. You can’t trust those
nurses a moment. But I believe that telepathic idea is a good one.”
“Yes, yes; it is,” said Ray. Now that the certainty of acceptance had
come, he was sobered by it, and he could not rejoice openly, though he
was afraid he was disappointing Mr. Brandreth. He could only say, “It’s
awfully kind of Mrs. Brandreth to think of me.”
“That’s her way,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he added briskly, “Well, now,
let’s come down to business. How do you want to publish? Want to make
your own plates?”
“No,” Ray faltered; “I can’t afford to do that; I had one such offer”--
“I supposed you wouldn’t,” Mr. Brandreth cut in, “but I thought I’d
ask. Well, then, we’ll make the plates ourselves, and we’ll pay you ten
per cent. on the retail price of the book. That is the classic
arrangement with authors, and I think it’s fair.” When he said this he
swallowed, as if there were something in his throat, and added, “Up to a
certain point. And as we take all the risk, I think we ought to
have--You see, on one side it’s a perfect lottery, and on the other side
it’s a dead certainty. You can’t count on the public, but you can count
on the landlord, the salesman, the bookkeeper, the printer, and the
paper-maker. We’re at all the expense--rent, clerk-hire, plates,
printing, binding, and advertising, and the author takes no risk
whatever.”
It occurred to Ray afterwards that an author took the risk of losing his
labor if his book failed; but the public estimates the artist’s time at
the same pecuniary value as the sitting hen’s, and the artist insensibly
accepts the estimate. Ray did not think of his point in season to urge
it, but it would hardly have availed if he had. He was tremulously eager
to close with Mr. Brandreth on any terms, and after they had agreed, he
was afraid he had taken advantage of him.
When the thing was done it was like everything else. He had dwelt so
long and intensely upon it in a thousand reveries that he had perhaps
exhausted his possibilities of emotion concerning it. At any rate he
found himself curiously cold; he wrote to his father about it, and he
wrote to Sanderson, who would be sure to make a paragraph for the
_Echo_, and unless Hanks Brothers killed his paragraph, would electrify
Midland with the news. Ray forecast the matter and the manner of the
paragraph, but it did not excite him.
“What is the trouble with me?” he asked Kane, whom he hastened to tell
his news. “I ought to be in a transport; I’m not in anything of the
kind.”
“Ah! That is very interesting. No doubt you’ll come to it. I had a
friend once who was accepted in marriage by the object of his
affections. His first state was apathy, mixed, as nearly as I could
understand, with dismay. He became more enthusiastic later on, and lived
ever after in the belief that he was one of the most fortunate of men.
But I think we are the victims of conventional acceptations in regard to
most of the great affairs of life. We are taught that we shall feel so
and so about such and such things: about success in love or in
literature; about the birth of our first-born; about death. But probably
no man feels as he expected to feel about these things. He finds them of
exactly the same quality as all other experiences; there may be a little
more or a little less about them, but there isn’t any essential
difference. Perhaps when we come to die ourselves, it will be as simply
and naturally as--as”--
“As having a book accepted by a publisher,” Ray suggested.
“Exactly!” said Kane, and he breathed out his deep, soft laugh.
“Well, you needn’t go on. I’m sufficiently accounted for.” Ray rose,
and Kane asked him what his hurry was, and where he was going.
“I’m going up to tell the Hugheses.”
“Ah! then I won’t offer to go with you,” said Kane. “I approve of your
constancy, but I have my own philosophy of such things. I think David
would have done much better to stay where he was; I do not wish to
punish him for coming to meet the world, and reform it on its own
ground; but I could have told him he would get beaten. He is a thinker,
or a dreamer, if you please, and in his community he had just the right
sort of distance. He could pose the world just as he wished, and turn it
in this light and in that. But here he sees the exceptions to his rules,
and when I am with him I find myself the prey of a desire to dwell on
the exceptions, and I know that I afflict him. I always did, and I feel
it the part of humanity to keep away from him. I am glad that I do, for
I dislike very much being with sick people. Of course I shall go as
often as decency requires. For Decency,” Kane concluded, with the effect
of producing a Hard Saying, “transcends Humanity. So many reformers
forget that,” he added.
The days were now getting so long that they had just lighted the lamps
in Hughes’s room when Ray came in, a little after seven. He had a few
words with Peace in the family room first, and she told him that her
father had passed a bad day, and she did not know whether he was asleep
or not.
“Then I’ll go away again,” said Ray.
“No, no; if he is awake, he will like to see you. He always does. And
now he can’t see you much oftener.”
“Oh, Peace! Do you really think so?”
“The doctor says so. There is no hope any more.” There was no faltering
in her voice, and its steadiness strengthened Ray, standing so close to
one who stood so close to death.
“Does he--your father--know?”
“I can’t tell. He is always so hopeful. And Jenny won’t hear of giving
up. She is with him more than I am, and she says he has a great deal of
strength yet. He can still work at his book a little. He has every part
of it in mind so clearly that he can tell her what to do when he has the
strength to speak. The worst is, when his voice fails him--he gets
impatient. That was what brought on his hemorrhage to-day.”
“Peace! I am ashamed to think why I came to-night. But I hoped it might
interest him.”
“About your book? Oh yes. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about it. I thought
you would like to tell him.”
“Thank you,” said Ray. He was silent for a moment. She stood against the
pale light of one of the windows, a shadowy outline, and he felt as if
they were two translated spirits meeting there exterior to the world and
all its interests; he made a mental note of his impression for use some
time. But now he said: “I thought I should like to tell him, too. But
after all, I’m not so sure. I’m not like you, Peace. And I suppose I’m
punished for my egotism in the very hour of my triumph. It isn’t like a
triumph; it’s like--nothing. I’ve looked forward to this so long--I’ve
counted on it so much--I’ve expected it to be like having the world in
my hand. But if I shut my hand, it’s empty.”
He knew that he was appealing to her for comfort, and he expected her to
respond as she did.
“That’s because you don’t realize it yet. When you do, it will seem the
great thing that it is.”
“Do you think it’s a great thing?”
“As great as any success can be.”
“Do you think it will succeed?”
“Mr. Brandreth thinks it will. He’s very hopeful about it.”
“Sometimes I wish it would fail. I don’t believe it deserves to succeed.
I’m ashamed of it in places. Have I any right to let him foist it on the
public if I don’t perfectly respect it? You wouldn’t if it were yours.”
He wished her to deny that it was bad in any part, but she did not. She
merely said: “I suppose that’s the way our work always seems to us when
it’s done. There must be a time when we ought to leave what we’ve done
to others; it’s for them, not for ourselves; why shouldn’t they judge
it?”
“Yes; that is true! How generous you are! How can you endure to talk to
me of my book? But I suppose you think that if I can stand it, you can.”
“I will go in, now,” said Peace, ignoring the drift of his words, “and
see if father is awake.” She returned in a moment, and murmured softly,
“Come!”
“Here is Mr. Ray, father,” said Mrs. Denton. She had to lift her voice
to make the sick man hear, for the window was open, and the maniacal
clamor of the street flooded the chamber. Hughes lay at his thin
full-length in his bed, like one already dead.
He stirred a little at the sound of his daughter’s voice; and when he
had taken in the fact of Ray’s presence, he signed to her to shut the
window. The smells of the street, and the sick, hot whiffs from the
passing trains were excluded; the powerful odors of the useless drugs
burdened the air; by the light of the lamp shaded from Hughes’s eyes Ray
could see the red blotches on his sheet and pillow.
He no longer spoke, but he could write with a pencil on the little
memorandum-block which lay on the stand by his bed. When Peace said,
“Father, Mr. Ray has come to tell you that his book has been accepted;
Chapley & Co. are going to publish it,” the old man’s face lighted up.
He waved his hand toward the stand, and Mrs. Denton put the block and
pencil in it, and held the lamp for him to see.
Ray took the block, and read, faintly scribbled on it: “Good! You must
get them to take my _World Revisited_.”
The sick man smiled as Ray turned his eyes toward him from the paper.
“What is it?” demanded Mrs. Denton, after a moment. “Some secret? What
is it, father?” she pursued, with the lightness that evidently pleased
him, for he smiled again, and an inner light shone through his glassy
eyes. “Tell us, Mr. Ray!”
Hughes shook his head weakly, still smiling, and Ray put the leaf in his
pocket. Then he took up the old man’s long hand where it lay inert on
the bed.
“I will do my very best, Mr. Hughes. I will do everything that I
possibly can.”