After a silent and solitary dinner, Ray went to see Mrs. Denton and
Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in
Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the
lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first
visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday
ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine,
and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters.
They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the
machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of
Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family,
and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.
That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right
along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted
obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in
her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back
in a moment.”
He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and
his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between
himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk
the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at
the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The
girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply
defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She
had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not
hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his
mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and
he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other
side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above
the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and
twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the
foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst;
and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.
He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first
spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with
Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I
think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back.
I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another
spring. Why didn’t I do it?”
“Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work there,” she suggested.
“Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of
life to--their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my
newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another
unsuccessful novel.”
“Is your novel a failure?” she asked.
“Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to
know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t
complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old
Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw
him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I
could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail
in a bad cause--that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had
put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if
possible, flatter him.
“I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.
“Oh, have you?” he palpitated.
“And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read
it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way”--
“Yes?”
“And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing
the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand
just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over
the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine’s character
beautifully. Mr. Simpson wondered whether you really believe in
hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it.”
Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew
very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to
judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society
woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous,
and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then
came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and
reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and
knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted,
common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made
his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time
presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who
despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but
somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art
proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray
could not make this choice. He said dreamily: “If Mr. Brandreth could
only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a
twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you
could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if
you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it.”
Peace laughed a little. “Oh, they disliked the wicked people. They
thought the hard old father of the heroine was terrible, and was justly
punished by his daughter’s death. At the same time they thought you
ought to have had her revive in time to seize the hero’s hand, when he
is going to shoot himself, and keep him from giving himself a mortal
wound. The cousin ought to get well, too; or else confess before he dies
that he intended to throw the hero over the cliff, so that it could be
made out a case of self-defence. Mr. Simpson says that could be done to
the satisfaction of any jury.”
Ray laughed too. “Yes. It would have been more popular if it had ended
well.”
“Perhaps not,” Peace suggested. “Isn’t it the great thing to make people
talk about a book? If it ended well they wouldn’t have half so much to
say as they will now about it.”
“Perhaps,” Ray assented with meek hopefulness. “But, Peace, what do
_you_ say about it? You’ve never told me that yet. Do you really despise
it so much?”
“I’ve never said that I despised it.”
“You’ve never said you didn’t, and by everything that you’ve done,
you’ve left me to think that you do. I know,” said the young man, “that
I’m bringing up associations and recollections that must be painful to
you; they’re painful and humiliating to me. But it seems to me that you
owe me that much.”
“I owe you much more than that,” said the girl. “Do you think that I
forget--can forget--anything--all that you’ve been to us?”
“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Ray. “I didn’t mean that. And you needn’t
tell me now what you think of my book. But sometime you will, won’t
you?” He drew forward a little nearer to her, where they sat in the
light which had begun to wane. “Until then--until then--I want you to
let me be the best friend you have in the world--the best friend I can
be to any one.”
He stopped for some answer from her, and she said: “No one could be a
truer friend to us than you have been, from the very first. And we have
mixed you up so in our trouble!”
“Oh, no! But if it’s given me any sort of right to keep on coming to see
Mrs. Denton and you, just as I used?”
“Why not?” she returned.