Ray did not go to deliver any of his letters that afternoon; he decided now that it would be out of taste to do so on Sunday, as he had already doubted that it would be, in the morning. He passed the afternoon in his room, trying from time to time to reduce the turmoil of his reveries to intelligible terms in verse, and in poetic prose. He did nothing with them; in the end, though, he was aware of a new ideal, and he resolved that if he could get his story back from Chapley & Co., he would rewrite the passages that characterized the heroine, and make it less like the every-day, simple prettiness of his first love. He had always known that this did not suit the character he had imagined; he now saw that it required a more complex and mystical charm. But he did not allow himself to formulate these volitions and perceptions, any more than his conviction that he had now a double reason for keeping away from Mr. Brandreth and from Miss Hughes. He spent the week in an ecstasy of forbearance. On Saturday afternoon he feigned the necessity of going to ask Mr. Brandreth how he thought a novel in verse, treating a strictly American subject in a fantastic way, would succeed. He really wished to learn something without{137} seeming to wish it, about his manuscript, but he called so late in the afternoon that he found Mr. Brandreth putting his desk in order just before starting home. He professed a great pleasure at sight of Ray, and said he wished he would come part of the way home with him; he wanted to have a little talk.
As if the word home had roused the latent forces of hospitality in him, he added, “I want to have you up at my place, some day, as soon as we can get turned round. Mrs. Brandreth is doing first-rate, now; and that boy—well, sir, he’s a perfect Titan. I wish you could see him undressed. He’s just like the figure of the infant Hercules strangling the serpent when he grips the nurse’s finger. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe that fellow recognizes me, and distinguishes between me and his mother. I suppose it’s my hat—I come in with my hat on, you know, just to try him; and when he catches sight of that hat, you ought to see his arms go!”
The paternal rhapsodies continued a long time after they were in the street, and Ray got no chance to bring in either his real or pretended business. He listened with mechanical smiles and hollow laughter, alert at the same time for the slightest vantage which Mr. Brandreth should give him. But the publisher said of his own motion:
“Oh, by-the-way, you’ll be interested to know that our readers’ reports on your story are in.”
“Are they?” Ray gasped. He could not get out any more.{138}
Mr. Brandreth went on: “I didn’t examine the reports very attentively myself, but I think they were favorable, on the whole. There were several changes suggested: I don’t recall just what. But you can see them all on Monday. We let Miss Hughes go after lunch on Saturdays, and she generally takes some work home with her, and I gave them to her to put in shape for you. I thought it would be rather instructive for you to see the different opinions in the right form. I believe you can’t have too much method in these things.”
“Of course,” said Ray, in an anguish of hope and fear. The street seemed to go round; he hardly knew where he was. He bungled on inarticulately before he could say: “I believe in method, too. But I’m sorry I couldn’t have had the reports to-day, because I might have had Sunday to think the suggestions over, and see what I could do with them.”
“Well, I’m sorry, too. She hadn’t been gone half an hour when you came in. If I’d thought of your happening in! Well, it isn’t very long till Monday! She’ll have them ready by that time. I make it a rule myself to put all business out of my mind from 2 P.M. on Saturday till Monday 9 A.M., and I think you’ll find it an advantage, too. I won’t do business, and I won’t talk business, and I won’t think business after two o’clock on Saturday. I believe in making Sunday a day of rest and family enjoyment. We have an early dinner; and then I like to have my wife read or play to me, and now we have in the baby, and that amuses us.{139}”
Ray forced himself to say that as a rule he did not believe in working on Sunday either; he usually wrote letters. He abruptly asked Mr. Brandreth how he thought it would do for him to go and ask Miss Hughes for a sight of the readers’ reports in the rough.
Mr. Brandreth laughed. “You are anxious! Do you know where she lives?”
“Oh, yes; I stopped there last Sunday with Mr. Kane on our way to the Park. I saw Mr. Chapley there.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, with the effect of being arrested by the last fact in something he might otherwise have said. It seemed to make him rather unhappy. “Then you saw Miss Hughes’s father?”
“Yes; and all his friends,” Ray answered, in a way that evidently encouraged Mr. Brandreth to go on.
“Yes? What did you think of them?”
“I thought they were mostly harmless; but one or two of them ought to have been in the violent wards.”
“Did Mr. Chapley meet them?”
“Oh, no; he went away before any of them came in. As Mr. Kane took me, I had to stay with him.”
Mr. Brandreth got back a good deal of his smiling complacency, which had left him at Ray’s mention of Mr. Chapley in connection with Hughes. “Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are old friends.”
“Yes; I understood something of that kind.”
“They date back to the Brook Farm days together.{140}”
“Mr. Hughes is rather too much of the Hollingsworth type for my use,” said Ray. He wished Mr. Brandreth to understand that he had no sympathy with Hughes’s wild-cat philosophy, both because he had none, and because he believed it would be to his interest with Mr. Brandreth to have none.
“I’ve never seen him,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I like Mr. Chapley’s loyalty to his friends—it’s one of his fine traits; but I don’t see any necessity for my taking them up. He goes there every Sunday morning to see Mr. Hughes, and they talk—political economy together. You knew Mr. Chapley has been a good deal interested in this altruistic agitation.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Ray.
“Yes. You can’t very well keep clear of it altogether. I was mixed up in it myself at one time: our summer place is on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Massachusetts, and we had our Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of a social union for the work-people; we made over two hundred dollars for them. Mr. Chapley was a George man in ’86. Not that he agreed with the George men exactly; but he thought there ought to be some expression against the way things are going. You know a good many of the nicest kind of people went the same way at that time. I don’t object to that kind of thing as long as it isn’t carried too far. Mr. Chapley used to see a good deal of an odd stick of a minister at our summer place that had got some of the new ideas in a pretty crooked kind of shape; and then he’s read Tolstoï a{141} good deal, and he’s been influenced by him. I think Hughes is a sort of safety valve for Mr. Chapley, and that’s what I tell the family. Mr. Chapley isn’t a fool, and he’s always had as good an eye for the main chance as anybody. That’s all.”
Ray divined that Mr. Brandreth would not have entered into this explanation of his senior partner and father-in-law, except to guard against the injurious inferences which he might draw from having met Mr. Chapley at Hughes’s, but he did not let his guess appear in his words. “I don’t wonder he likes Mr. Hughes,” he said. “He’s fine, and he seems a light of sanity and reason among the jack-a-lanterns he gathers round him. He isn’t at all Tolstoïan.”
“He’s a gentleman, born and bred,” said Mr. Brandreth, “and he was a rich man for the days before he began his communistic career. And Miss Hughes is a perfect lady. She’s a cultivated girl, too, and she reads a great deal. I’d rather have her opinion about a new book than half the critics’ I know of, because I know I could get it honest, and I know it would be intelligent. Well, if you’re going up there, you’ll want to be getting across to the avenue to take the elevated.” He added, “I don’t mean to give you the impression that we’ve made up our minds about your book, yet. We haven’t. A book is a commercial venture as well as a literary venture, and we’ve got to have a pow-wow about that side of it before we come to any sort of conclusion. You understand?”
“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Ray, “and I’ll{142} try not to be unreasonably hopeful,” but at the same moment his heart leaped with hope.
“Well, that’s right,” said Mr. Brandreth, taking his hand for parting. He held it, and then he said, with a sort of desperate impulse, “By-the-way, why not come home with me, now, and take dinner with us?{143}”