Ray woke from his rapid mental formulation of this comforting reassurance to find the old man saying to him, “What is the nature of the work that Chapley has published for you? I hope something by which you intend to advance others, as well as yourself: something that is to be not merely the means of your personal aggrandizement in fame and fortune. Nothing, in my getting back to the world, strikes me as more shamelessly selfish than the ordinary literary career. I don’t wonder the art has sunk so low; its aims are on the business level.”
Mr. Kane listened with an air of being greatly amused, and even gratified, and Ray thought he had purposely let the old man go on as if he were an author who had already broken the shell. Before he could think of some answer that should at once explain and justify him, Kane interposed:
“I hope Mr. Ray is no better than the rest of us; but he may be; you must make your arraignment and condemnation conditional, at any rate. He’s an author in petto, as yet; Chapley may never publish him.”
“Then why,” said the old man, irascibly, “did you speak of him as you did to Chapley? It was misleading.”
“In the world you’ve come back to, my dear friend,{96}” said Kane, “you’ll find that we have no time to refine upon the facts. We can only sketch the situation in large, bold outlines. Perhaps I wished to give Mr. Ray a hold upon Chapley by my premature recognition of him as an author, and make the wicked publisher feel that there was already a wide general impatience to see Mr. Ray’s book.”
“That would have been very corrupt, Kane,” said the other. “But I owe Mr. Ray an apology.”
Ray found his tongue. “Perhaps you won’t think so when you see my novel.”
“A novel! Oh, I have no time to read novels!” the old man burst out. “A practical man”—
“Nor volumes of essays,” said Kane, picking up a book from the table at his elbow. “Really, as a measure of self-defence, I must have the leaves of my presentation copies cut, at any rate. I must sacrifice my taste to my vanity. Then I sha’n’t know when the grateful recipients haven’t opened them.”
“I’ve no time to read books of any kind”—the old man began again.
“You ought to set up reviewer,” Kane interposed again.
“Oh, I’ve looked into your essays, Kane, here and there. The literature is of a piece with the affectation of the uncut edges: something utterly outdated and superseded. It’s all as impertinent as the demand you make that the reader should do the work of a bookbinder, and cut your leaves.”
“Do you know that I’m really hurt—not for my{97}self, but for you!—by what you say of my uncut edges? You descend to the level of a Brandreth,” said Kane.
“A Brandreth? What is a Brandreth?”
“It is a publisher: Chapley’s son-in-law and partner.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Hughes.
“I spent many hours,” said Kane, plaintively, “pleading with him for an edition with uncut edges. He contended that the public would not buy it if the edges were not cut; and I told him that I wished to have that fact to fall back upon, in case they didn’t buy it for some other reason. And I was right. The edition hasn’t sold, and the uncut edges have saved me great suffering until now. Why not have confined your own remarks, my dear friend, to the uncut edges? I might have agreed with you.”
“Because,” said the old man, “I cannot have patience with a man of your age who takes the mere dilettante view of life—who regards the world as something to be curiously inspected and neatly commented, instead of toiled for, sweated for, suffered for!”
“It appears to me that there is toiling and sweating and suffering enough for the world already,” said Kane, with a perverse levity. “Look at the poor millionnaires, struggling to keep their employés in work! If you’ve come back to the world for no better purpose than to add to its perseverance and perspiration, I could wish for your own sake that you had remained in some of your communities—or all of them, for that matter.{98}”
The other turned half round in his chair, and looked hard into Kane’s smiling face. “You are a most unserious spirit, Kane, and you always were! When will you begin to be different? Do you expect to continue a mere frivolous maker of phrases to the last? Your whole book there is just a bundle of phrases—labels for things. Do you ever intend to be anything?”
“I intend to be an angel, some time—or some eternity,” said Kane. “But, in the meanwhile, have you ever considered that perhaps you are demanding, in your hopes of what you call the redemption of the race from selfishness, as sheer and mere an impossibility as a change of the physical basis of the soul?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—or, I won’t put it affirmatively; I will put it interrogatively.”
“Yes, that was always your way!”
“I will merely ask you,” Kane went on, without heeding the interruption, “what reason you have to suppose the altruistic is not eternally conditioned in the egoistic, just as the spiritual is conditioned in the animal?”
“What jargon is that?” demanded the old man, throwing one leg over the other, and smoothing the upper one down with his hand, as he bent forward to glower at Kane.
“It is the harmony of the spheres, my dear David; it is a metaphysical variation of the pleasing air that the morning stars sang together; it is the very truth.{99} The altruistic can no more shake off the egoistic in this world than the spiritual can shake off the animal. As soon as man ceases to get hungry three times a day, just so soon will he cease to eat his fellow-man.”
“There is the usual trivial truth in what you say,” Hughes replied, “and the usual serious impiety. You probably are not aware that your miserable paradox accuses the Creative Intelligence.”
“Ah, but use another word! Say Nature, and then where is the impiety?”
“But I decline to use the other word,” Hughes retorted.
“And I insist upon it; I must. It is Nature that I accuse; not the divine nature, or even human nature, but brute nature, that commits a million blunders, and destroys myriads of types, in order to arrive at such an imperfect creature as man still physically is, after untold ages of her blind empiricism. If the human intelligence could be put in possession of the human body, we should have altruism at once. We should not get hungry three times a day; instead of the crude digestive apparatus which we have inherited with apparently no change whatever from the cave-dweller, we should have an organ delicately adjusted to the exigencies of modern life, and responsive to all the emotions of philanthropy. But no! The stomach of the nineteenth century remains helplessly in the keeping of primeval nature, who is a mere Bourbon; who learns nothing and forgets nothing. She obliges us to struggle on with a rude arrangement developed from{100} the mollusk, and adapted at best to the conditions of the savage; imperative and imperfect; liable to get out of order with the carefulest management, and to give way altogether with the use of half a lifetime. No, David! You will have to wait until man has come into control of his stomach, and is able to bring his ingenuity to bear upon its deficiencies. Then, and not till then, you will have the Altruistic Man. Until then the egoistic man will continue to eat his brother, and more or less indigest him—if there is such a verb.”
Ray listened with one ear to them. The other was filled with the soft murmur of women’s voices from the further end of the little apartment; they broke now and then from a steady flow of talk, and rippled into laughter, and then smoothed themselves to talk again. He longed to know what they were talking about, laughing about.
“No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium, per se, except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays; but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it come a great many times, and go even oftener.”
“Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Ray{101} that it made him start in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,” and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.
He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room, and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddently fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines of the pocket-book affair on the train.
He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his”—
He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they were, and went out with it.
Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you sit down—if it isn’t too hot here?{102}”