“If ever I come again,” Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the street, “I think I shall know it!” He abhorred all sorts of social outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled with a sense of personal injury from Hughes’s asking him to take part in their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of favor done which he must not allow to become painful.
He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains hurtling by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.{127}
He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the avenue and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park. Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space, in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down upon the havoc thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet pleasance.
“Amiable prospect, isn’t it?” said Kane. “It looks as if Hughes’s Afreet has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn’t to judge of it at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!” He passed his hand through Ray’s lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on the scenery. “Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear old friend?”
“Of Mr. Hughes?” Ray asked; and he restrained himself in a pretended question.
“Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes’s friends.”
Ray flashed out upon this. “I think his friends are a lot of cranks.”
“Yes; very good; very excellent good! They are a lot of cranks. Are they the first you have met in New York?{128}”
“No; the place seems to be full of them.”
“Beginning with the elderly gentleman whom you met the first morning?”
“Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman.”
Kane smiled with appreciation. “Well, we won’t be harsh on those two. We won’t call them cranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired dreamers, if you like. As I understand it, we are all dreamers. If we like a man’s dream, we call him a prophet; if we don’t like his dream, we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes inside of six months?”
The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. “What is the matter with the world?” he burst out. “I don’t see that the world is so very sick. Why isn’t it going on very well? I don’t understand what this talk is all about. I don’t see what those people have got to complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his work is worth, and let the best man win. What’s the trouble? Where’s the wrong?”
“Ah,” said Kane, “what a pity you didn’t set forth those ideas when Hughes called upon you!”
“And have all that crew jump on me? Thank you!” said Ray.{129}
“You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew,” said Kane. “I don’t know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn’t help feeling to-day how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David’s were very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don’t like being spoken to in meeting?”
“No, I don’t,” said Ray, bluntly.
“I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don’t think poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly feels that he’s got to hurry, if he’s going to have the kingdom of heaven on earth in his time; and he wants every one to lend a hand.”
For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked stiffly: “Couldn’t he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn’t be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?”
“No, I don’t know that he could,” said Kane, with a pensive singleness rare in him. “Any help of that kind would mean dependence, and David Hughes is proud.”
They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the viaduct carrying the northern{130} railways; one of its noble arches opened before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent was like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stableyard; a shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped behind its dusty, leafless vines.
“He might be got into that,” said Kane, whimsically, “at no increase of rent, and at much increase of comfort and quiet—at least till the Afreet began to get in his work.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather too much like that eremitism which he’s so down on?” asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.
“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would,” Kane consented, as they struck across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks; the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.
“I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitage{131} somewhere—a co-operative hermitage, I suppose,” Ray went on. He did not feel bound to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone.
“Ah, yes,” said Kane. “What did you make of the son-in-law?”
“I don’t know. He’s a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke of his work.”
“Why, it’s rather a romantic story, I believe,” said Kane. “He was a young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he was going to find work; he’s a wood-engraver. I believe he’s always had the notion that the world was out of kilter, and it seems that he wasn’t very well himself when he looked in on the Family to see what they were doing to help it. He fell sick on their hands, and the Hugheses took care of him. Naturally, he married one of them when he got well enough, and naturally he married the wrong one.”
“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man”—
Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “His notion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by{132} them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.”
“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.
“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind—the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature—the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest”—
“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.”
“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of Hard Sayings.”
“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”
“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of A New Romeo. Is that what you call it?”
Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:
“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of{133} truth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her she. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Ray’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”
“Oh, no”—Ray began.
“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane. “Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I couldn’t go. I forgot how repugnant the{134} golden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away.”
He laughed, and Ray, more reluctantly, laughed with him.
“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I”—
He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.
“Perhaps that is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am not in pro{135}spective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your welcome.”
Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t. You must excuse me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But”—
“You don’t trust me!”
“Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t feel quite up to meeting people just now; I’ll push on down town. I’m rather tired. Good-by.”
Kane held his hand between both his palms. “I wonder what the real reason is! Is it grudge, or pride, or youth?”
“Neither,” said Ray. “It’s—clothes. My boots are muddy, and I’ve got on my second-best trousers.”
“Ah, now you are frank with me, and you give me a real reason. Perhaps you are right. I dare say I should have thought so once.{136}”