Whether the boom for _A Modern Romeo_ which began with the appearance of
the _Metropolis_ review was an effect of that review or not, no one
acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say.
There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in the _Metropolis_
which had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in
ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book
was due wholly to its merit.
“And what was its long failure due to?” Ray asked, tasting the bitter of
the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.
“To its demerit.”
Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review;
afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the
review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which,
in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize.
What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other
influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began
to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers’
windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow
it was in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say;
he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross,
palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these
had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the
peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly
invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a
Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he
could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful
for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did
not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for
psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and
disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She
was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist
appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but
of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while
he remained seated. It was specially confided to lady readers that his
slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as
smooth and pure as a girl’s. The processed reproduction of Ray’s
photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much
like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear
in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the
obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it
came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes, it brought him a
letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his
father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and
respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the
papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince
her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how
in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out
of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his
hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in
their studies of him; at the _Every Evening_ office, where their visits
subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief
was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray’s
celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews,
he took occasion to say: “I like your work and I want to keep you. As it
is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I
prefer to anticipate, and you’ll find it put up in your next check to
the figure which I think the paper ought to stand.” He did not otherwise
recognize the fact of the book’s success, or speak of it; as compared
with his paper, Ray’s book was of no importance to him whatever.
The interviews were always flattering to Ray’s vanity, in a certain way,
but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not
read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it
and read it. In some cases they came to him with poetic preoccupations
from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse
them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much
stranger than fiction.
“Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book,”
one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly
upon the author’s, “it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in
the whole history of literature. _Won’t_ you tell _me_ the truth about
it, Mr. Ray?”
“Why, I don’t know the truth about it myself,” Ray said.
“Oh, how delightful!” cried the young lady. “I’m going to put _that_ in,
at any rate;” and she continued to work the young author with her
appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had
got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his
novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of
telling.
He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of
himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very
remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six
months among the trade?”
Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of
recollection, “Oh! _That_ girl! Well, she was determined to have
_something_ exclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I
wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a
good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you that when I chanced it on
this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance
it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the
house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went
up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying
anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and
she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into
the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two
families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it
would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have
pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”
“That _is_ interesting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to
pose as your preserver.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested.
“And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no
reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to
take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife,
and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps
postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke
us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to
grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on
with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that
girl what she repeated to you.”
“Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even
tragical.”
“Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made
it right with Mr. Hughes.”
“Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right with _him_,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how
I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken
his book and would bring it out at once.”
Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that.
But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your
book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I
believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended,
cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know that _A Modern Romeo_ has come of age;
we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”
“Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the
talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to
fifty thousand by this time.
The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three
thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The
author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could
arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book
which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep
on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it
did not. Had it, by some process of natural selection, reached exactly
those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make,
and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue?
He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical
discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr.
Brandreth.
Finally, Kane said: “Why do we always seek a law for things? Is there a
law for ourselves? We think so, but it’s out of sight for the most part,
and generally we act from mere caprice, from impulse. I’ve lived a good
many years, but I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve seen the cause
overtaken by the consequence more than two or three times; then it
struck me as rather theatrical. Consequences I’ve seen a plenty, but not
causes. Perhaps this is merely a sphere of ultimations. We used to
flatter ourselves, in the simple old days, when we thought we were all
miserable sinners, that we were preparing tremendous effects, to follow
elsewhere, by what we said and did here. But what if the things that
happen here are effects initiated elsewhere?”
“It’s a very pretty conjecture,” said Ray, “but it doesn’t seem to have
a very direct bearing on the falling off in the sale of _A Modern
Romeo_.”
“Everything in the universe is related to that book, if you could only
see it properly. If it has stopped selling, it is probably because the
influence of some favorable star, extinguished thousands of years ago,
has just ceased to reach this planet.”
Kane had the air of making a mental note after he said this, and Ray
began to laugh. “There ought to be money in that,” he said.
“No, there is no money in Hard Sayings,” Kane returned, sadly; “there is
only--wisdom.”
Ray was by no means discouraged with his failures to divine the reason
for the arrested sale of his book. At heart he was richly satisfied with
its success, and he left the public without grudging, to their belief
that it had sold a hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Brandreth was
satisfied, too. He believed that the sale would pick up again in the
fall after people got back from the country; he had discovered that the
book had enduring qualities; but now the question was, what was Ray
going to write next? “You ought to strike while the iron’s hot, you
know.”
“Of course, I’ve been thinking about that,” the young fellow admitted,
“and I believe I’ve got a pretty good scheme for a novel.”
“Could you give me some notion of it?”
“No, I couldn’t. It hasn’t quite crystallized in my mind yet. And I
don’t believe it will, somehow, till I get a name for it.”
“Have you thought of a name?”
“Yes--half-a-dozen that won’t do.”
“There’s everything in a name,” said the publisher. “I believe it made
the _Modern Romeo’s_ fortune.”
Ray mused a moment. “How would _A Rose by any other Name_ do?”
“That’s rather attractive,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Well, anyway, remember
that we are to have the book.”
Ray hesitated. “Well--not on those old ten-percent. terms, Brandreth.”
“Oh, I think we can arrange the terms all right,” said Mr. Brandreth.
“Because I can do much better, you know.”
“Oh, they’ve been after you, have they?”
The young fellow held up the fingers of one hand.
“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “your next book belongs to Chapley & Co. You
want to keep your books together. One will help sell the other. _A Rose
by any other Name_ will wake up _A Modern Romeo_ when it comes out.”