Читать книгу The World Of Chance - William Dean Howells - Страница 14

XI.

Ray would have liked to go again that day, and give Mr. Brandreth his new address in person; but he was afraid it would seem too eager, and would have a bad effect on the fortunes of his book. He mastered himself so far that even the next day' he did not go, but sent it in a note. Then he was sorry he had done this, for it might look a little too indifferent; that is, he feigned that it might have this effect; but what he really regretted was that it cut him off from going to see Mr. Brandreth as soon as he would have liked. It would be absurd to run to him directly after writing. He languished several days in the heroic resolution not to go near Chapley & Co. until a proper time had passed; then he took to walking up and down Broadway, remote from their place at first, and afterwards nearer, till it came to his pacing slowly past their door, and stopping at their window, in the hope that one or other of the partners would happen upon him in some of their comings or goings. But they never did, and he had a faint, heart-sick feeling of disappointment, such as he used to have when he hung about the premises of his first love in much the same fashion and to much the same effect.

He cajoled himself by feigning interviews, now with Mr. Chapley and now with Mr. Brandreth; the publishers accepted his manuscript with transport, and offered him incredible terms. The good old man's voice shook with emotion in hailing Ray as the heir of Hawthorne; Mr. Brandreth had him up to dinner, and presented him to his wife and baby; he named the baby for them jointly. As nothing of this kind really happened, Ray's time passed rather forlornly. Without being the richer for it, he won the bets he made himself, every morning, that he should not get a letter that day from Chapley & Co., asking to see him at once, or from Mr. Brandreth hoping for the pleasure of his company upon this social occasion or that. He found that he had built some hopes upon Mr. Brandreth's hospitable regrets; and as he did not know how long it must be after a happiness of the kind Mrs. Brandreth had conferred upon her husband before her house could be set in order for company, he was perhaps too impatient But he did not suffer himself to be censorious; he was duly grateful to Mr. Brandreth for his regrets; he had not expected them; but for them he would not have expected anything.

He did what he could to pass the time by visiting other publishers with Mr. Brandreth's card. He perceived sometimes, or fancied that he perceived, a shadow of anxiety in the gentlemen who received him so kindly, but it vanished, if it ever existed, when he put himself frankly on the journalistic ground, and satisfied them that he had no manuscript lurking about him. Then he found some of them willing to drop into chat about the trade, and try to forecast its nearer future, if not to philosophize its conditions. They appeared to think these were all right; and it did not strike Ray as amiss that a work of literary art should be regarded simply as a merchantable or unmerchantable commodity, or as a pawn in a game, a counter that stood for a certain money value, a risk which the player took, a wager that he made.

" You know it's really that," one publisher explained to Ray. '' No one can tell whether a book will succeed or not; no one knows what makes a book succeed. We have published things that I've liked and respected thoroughly, and that I've taken a personal pride and pleasure in pushing. They've been well received and intelligently praised by the best critics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and cultivated people have talked about them everywhere; and they haven't sold fifteen hundred copies Then we've tried trash — decent trash, of course; we always remember the cheek of the Young Person — and we've all believed that we had something that would hit the popular mood, and would leap into the tens of thousands; and it's dropped dead from the press. Other works of art and other pieces of trash succeed for no better reason than some fail. You can't tell anything about it. If I were to trust my own observation, I should say it was luck, pure and simple, and mostly bad luck. Ten books fail, and twenty books barely pay, where one succeeds. Nobody can say why. Can't I send you some of our new books? " He had a number of them on a table near him, and he talked them over with Ray, while a clerk did them up; and he would not let Ray trouble himself to carry them away with him. They were everywhere lavish of their publications with him, and he had so many new books and advance sheets given him that if he had been going to write his letters for the Echo about literature alone, he would have had material for many weeks ahead.

The letters he got at this time were some from home: a very sweet one from his mother, fondly conjecturing and questioning about his comfort in New York, and cautioning him not to take cold; a serious one from his father, advising him to try each week to put by something for a rainy day. There was also a letter from Sanderson, gay with news of all the goings on in Midland, and hilariously regretful of his absence. Sanderson did not say anything about coming to New York to seek his fortune, and the effect of his news was to leave Ray pining for the society of women, which had always been the sweetest thing in life to him, and next to literature the dearest. If he could have had immediate literary success, the excitement of it might have made him forget the privilege he had enjoyed at Midland of going every evening to call on some lovely young girl, and of staying as long as he liked. What made him feel still more lonesome and dropped out was Sanderson's telling of several engagements among the girls they knew in Midland; it appeared to him that he only was destined to go loveless and mateless through life.

There were women enough in his hotel, but after the first interest of their strangeness, and the romantic effect of hearing them speak in their foreign tongues as if they were at home in them, he could not imagine a farther interest in those opaque Southern blondes, who spoke French, or the brunettes with purple-ringed vast eyes, who coughed out their Spanish gutturals like squirrels. He was appointed a table for his meals in a dining-room that seemed to be reserved for its inmates, as distinguished from the frequenters of the restaurant, who looked as if they were all Americans; and he was served by a shining black waiter weirdly ignorant of English. He gazed wistfully across into the restaurant at times, and had half a mind to ask if he might not eat there; but he liked the glances of curiosity and perhaps envy which its frequenters now and then cast at him in the hotel dining-room. There were no young ladies among them, that he ever saw, but sometimes there were young men whom he thought he would have liked to talk with. Some of them came in company, and at dinner they sat long, discussing matters which he could overhear by snatches were literary and artistic matters. They always came late, and rarely sat down before seven, when Ray was finishing his coffee. One night these comrades came later than usual and in unusual force, and took a large table set somewhat apart from the rest in the bay of a deep window which had once looked out into the little garden of the dwelling that the hotel had once been. They sat down, with a babble of questions and answers, as of people who had not all met for some time, and devoured the little radishes and olives and anchovies, with which the table had been prefatorily furnished, in apparent patience till all the places but the ' head of the table had been taken; then they began to complain and to threaten at the delay of the dinner; Ray was not aware just how a furious controversy suddenly began to rage between two of them. As nearly as he could make out, amidst the rapid thrust and parry of the principals, and the irregular lunges of this one or that of the company which gave it the character of a free fight, it turned upon a point of aesthetics, where the question was whether the moral aspect ought or ought not to be sought in it. In the heat of the debate the chiefs of the discussion talked both at notice, interrupted each other, tried which should clamor loudest and fastest, and then suddenly the whole uproar fell to silence. The two parties casually discovered that they were of exactly the same mind, but each had supposed the other thought differently. Someone came in during the lull that followed, and took the seat at the head of the table.

It was Mr. Kane, and Ray's heart leaped with the hope that he would see him and recognize him, but out of self-respect he tried to look as if it were not he, but perhaps someone who closely resembled him. He perceived that it was a club dinner of some literary sort; but because he could not help wishing that he were one of the company, he snubbed his desires with unsparing cruelty. He looked down at his plate, and shunned the roving glance which he felt sure Mr. Kane was sending into the room where he now sat almost alone; and he did his best to be ashamed of overhearing the talk now and then. He grew very bitter in his solitude, and he imagined himself using Mr. Kane with great hauteur, after A Modern Romeo had succeeded. He was not obliged to go out that way, when he left the dining-room, but he feigned that he must, and in spite of the lofty stand he had taken with Mr. Kane in fancy, he meanly passed quite near him. Kane looked up, and called out, " Ah, good-evening, good-evening! " and rose and shook hands with him, and asked him how in the world he happened to have found out that restaurant, and he was astonished to hear that Ray was staying in the hotel; he said that was very chic. He introduced him to the company generally, as his young friend Mr. Ray, of Midland, who had come on to cast in his literary lot with them in New York; and then he presented him personally to the nearest on either hand. They were young fellows, but their names were known to Ray with the planetary distinctness that the names of young authors have for literary aspirants, though they are all so nebulous to older eyes.

Mr. Kane asked Ray to sit down and take his coffee with them; Ray said he had taken his coffee; they all urged that this was no reason why he should not take some more; he stood out against them, like a fool — as he later called himself with gnashing teeth. He pretended he had an engagement, and he left the pleasant company he was hungering so to join, and went out and walked the streets, trying to stay himself with the hope that he had made a better impression than if he had remained and enjoyed himself. He was so lonesome when he came back, and caught the sound of their jolly voices on his way up stairs, that he could hardly keep from going in upon them, and asking if they would let him sit with them. In his room he could not work; he wanted to shed tears in his social isolation. He determined to go back to Midland, at any cost to his feelings or fortunes, or even to the little village where his family lived, and where he had been so restless and unhappy till he could get away from it. Now, any place seemed better than this waste of unknown hundreds of thousands of human beings, where he had not a friend, or even an enemy.