Читать книгу The World Of Chance - William Dean Howells - Страница 13

X.

Ray's voice broke a little as he said this; but he hoped Mr. Brandreth did not notice, and he made haste to get out into the crowded street, and be alone with his emotions. He was quite giddy with the turn that Fortune's wheel had taken, and he Walked a long way up town before he recovered his balance. He had never dreamt of such prompt consideration as Mr. Brandreth had promised to give his novel. He had expected to carry it round from publisher to publisher, and to wait weeks, and perhaps whole months, for their decision. Most of them he imagined refusing to look at it at all; and he had prepared himself for rebuffs. He could not help thinking that Mr. Brandreth's different behavior was an effect of his goodness of heart, and of his present happiness. Of course he was a little ridiculous about that baby of his; Ray supposed that was natural, but he decided that if he should ever be a father he would not gush about it to the first person he met He did not like Mr. Brandreth's interrupting him with the account of those amateur theatricals when he was outlining the plot of his story; but that was excusable, and it showed that he was really interested. If it had not been for the accidental fact that Mr. Brandreth had taken the part of Romeo in those theatricals, he might not have caught on to the notion of A Modern Romeo at all. The question whether he was not rather silly himself to enter so fully into his plot, helped him to condone Mr. Brandreth's weakness, which was not incompatible with shrewd business sense. All that Mr. Brandreth had said of the state of the trade and its new conditions was sound; he was probably no fool where his interest was concerned. Ray resented for him the cruelty of Mr. Kane in turning the baby's precocity into the sort of joke he had made of it; but he admired his manner of saying things, too. He would work up very well in a story; but he ought to be made pathetic as well as ironical; he must be made to have had an early unhappy love-affair; the girl either to have died, or to have heartlessly jilted him. He could be the hero's friend at some important moment; Ray did not determine just at what moment; but the hero should be about to wreck his happiness, somehow, and Mr. Kane should save him from the rash act, and then should tell him the story of his own life. Ray recurred to the manuscript he had left with Mr. Brandreth, and wondered if Mr. Brandreth would read it himself, and if he did, whether he would see any resemblance between the hero and the author. He had sometimes been a little ashamed of that mesmerization business in the story, but if it struck a mood of the reading public, it would be a great piece of luck; and he prepared himself to respect it. If Chapley & Co. accepted the book, he was going to write all that passage over, and strengthen it.

He was very happy; and he said to himself that he must try to be very good and to merit the fortune that had befallen him. He must not let it turn his head, or seem more than it really was; after all it was merely a chance to be heard that he was given. He instinctively strove to arrest the wheel, which was bringing him up, and must carry him down if it kept on moving. With an impulse of the old heathen superstition lingering in us all, he promised his god, whom he imagined to be God, that he would be very grateful and humble if He would work a little miracle for him, and let the wheel carry him up without carrying him over and down. In the unconscious selfishness which he had always supposed morality, he believed that the thing most pleasing to his god would be some immediate effort in his own behalf, of prudent industry or frugality; and he made haste to escape from the bliss of his high hopes as if it were something that was wrong in itself, and that he would perhaps be punished for.

He went to the restaurant where he had breakfasted, and bargained for board and lodging by the week. It was not so cheap as he had expected to get it; with an apparent flexibility, the landlord was rigorous on the point of a dollar a day for the room; and Ray found that he must pay twelve dollars a week for his board and lodging instead of the ten he had set as a limit. But he said to himself that he must take the risk, and must make up the two dollars, somehow. His room was at the top of the house, and it had a view of the fourth story of a ten-story apartment-house opposite; but it had a southerly exposure, and there was one golden hour of the day when the sun shone into it, over the shoulder of a lower edifice next to the apartment-house, and round the side of a clock tower beyond the avenue. He could see a bit of the châlet-roof of an elevated railroad station; he could see the tops of people's heads in the street below if he leaned out of his window far enough, and he had the same bird's-eye view of the passing carts and carriages. He shared it with the sparrows that bickered in the window-casing, and with the cats that crouched behind the chimneys and watched the progress of the sparrows' dissensions with furtive and ironical eyes.

Within, the slope of the roof gave a picturesque slant to the ceiling. The room was furnished with an American painted set; there was a clock on the little shelf against the wall that looked as if it were French; but it was not going, and there was no telling what accent it might tick with if it were wound up. There was a little mahogany table in one comer near the window to write on, and he put his books up on the shelf on each side of the clock.

It was all very different from the dignified housing of his life at Midland, where less than the money he paid here got him a stately parlor, with a little chamber out of it, at the first boarding-house in the place. But still he would not have been ashamed to have any one from Midland see him in his present quarters. They were proper to New York in that cosmopolitan phase which he had most desired to see. He tried writing at the little table, and found it very convenient. He forced himself, just for moral effect, and to show himself that he was master of all his moods, to finish his letter to the Echo, and he pleased himself very well with it. He made it light and lively, and yet contrived to give it certain touches of poetry and to throw in bits of description which he fancied had caught something of the thrill and sparkle of the air, and imparted some sense of such a day as he felt it to be. He fancied different friends turning to the letter the first thing in the paper; and in the fond remembrance of the kindness he had left behind there, he became a little homesick.