He rose, after a late nap following his night-long vigils, with despair in his soul. He believed it was despair, and so it was to all intents and purposes. But, when he had bathed, he seemed to have washed a little of his despair away; when he had dressed, he felt hungry, and he ate his breakfast with rather more than his usual appetite.
The reaction was merely physical, and his gloom settled round him again when he went back to his attic and saw his manuscript and those deadly opinions. He had not the heart to go out anywhere, and he cowered alone in his room. If he could only get the light of some other mind on the facts he might grapple with them; but without this he was limp and helpless. Now he knew, in spite of all his pretences to the contrary, in spite of the warnings and cautions he had given himself, that he had not only hoped, but had expected, that his story would be found good enough to publish. Yet none of these readers—even those who found some meritorious traits in it—had apparently dreamed of recommending it for publication. It was no wonder that Miss Hughes had been so unwilling to tell him what she thought of it; that{164} she had urged him so strongly to read the opinions first. What a fool she must have thought him!
There was no one else he could appeal to, unless it was old Kane. He did not know where Kane lived, even if he could have gathered the courage to go to him in his extremity; and he bet himself that Kane would not repeat his last Sunday’s visit. The time for any reasonable hope of losing passed, and then to his great joy he lost. There came a hesitating step outside his door, as if some one were in doubt where to knock, and then a tap at it.
Ray flung it open, and at sight of Kane the tears came into his eyes, and he could not speak.
“Why, my dear friend!” cried Kane, “what is the matter?”
Ray kept silent till he could say coldly, “Nothing. It’s all over.”
Kane stepped into the room, and took off his hat. “If you haven’t been rejected by the object of your affections, you have had the manuscript of your novel declined. These are the only things that really bring annihilation. I think the second is worse. A man is never so absolutely and solely in love with one woman but he knows some other who is potentially lovable; that is the wise provision of Nature. But while a man has a manuscript at a publisher’s, it is the only manuscript in the world. You can readily work out the comparison. I hope you have merely been disappointed in love, my dear boy.”
Ray smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid it’s worse.{165}”
“Then Chapley & Co. have declined your novel definitely?”
“Not in set terms; or not yet. But their readers have all reported against it, and I’ve passed the night in reading their opinions. I’ve got them by heart. Would you like to hear me repeat them?” he demanded, with a fierce self-scorn.
Kane looked at him compassionately. “Heaven forbid! I could repeat them, I dare say, as accurately as you; the opinions of readers do not vary much, and I have had many novels declined.”
“Have you?” Ray faltered with compunction for his arrogation of all such suffering to himself.
“Yes. That was one reason why I began to write Hard Sayings. But if you will let me offer you another leaf from my experience, I will suggest that there are many chances for reprieve and even pardon after the readers have condemned your novel. I once had a novel accepted—the only novel I ever had accepted—after all the publisher’s readers had pronounced against it.”
“Had you?” Ray came tremulously back at him.
“Yes,” sighed Kane. “That is why Chapley is so fond of me; he has forgiven me a deadly injury.” He paused to let his words carry Ray down again, and then he asked, with a nod toward the bed where the young fellow had flung his manuscript and the readers’ opinions, “Might I?”
“Oh, certainly,” said Ray from his depths; and Kane took up the opinions and began to run them over.{166}
“Yes, they have a strangely familiar effect; they are like echoes from my own past.” He laid them down again. “Do you think they are right?”
“Yes. Perfectly! That is”—
“Oh! That is. There is hope, I see.”
“How, hope?” Ray retorted. “Does my differing with them make any difference as to the outcome?”
“For the book, no, perhaps; for you, yes, decidedly. It makes all the difference between being stunned and being killed. It is not pleasant to be stunned, but it is not for such a long time as being killed. What is your story about?”
It astonished Ray himself to find how much this question revived his faith and courage. His undying interest in the thing, by and for itself, as indestructible as a mother’s love, revived, and he gave Kane the outline of his novel. Then he filled this in, and he did not stop till he had read some of the best passages. He suddenly tossed his manuscript from him. “What a fool I am!”
Kane gave his soft, thick laugh, shutting his eyes, and showing his small white teeth, still beautifully sound. “Oh, no! Oh, no! I have read worse things than that! I have written worse than that. Come, come! Here is nothing to beat the breast for. I doubt if Chapley’s will take it, in defiance of their readers; their experience with me has rendered that very improbable. But they are not the only publishers in New York, or Philadelphia even; I’m told they{167} have very eager ones in Chicago. Why shouldn’t the roman psychologique, if that’s the next thing, as Mr. Brandreth believes, get on its legs at Chicago, and walk East?”
“I wonder,” Ray said, rising aimlessly from his chair, “whether it would do to call on Mr. Brandreth to-day? This suspense—Do you know whether he is very religious?”
“How should I know such a thing of my fellow-man in New York? I don’t know it even of myself. At times I am very religious, and at times, not. But Mr. Brandreth is rather a formal little man, and a business interview on Sunday, with an agonized author, might not seem exactly decorous to him.”
“I got the impression he wasn’t very stiff. But it wouldn’t do,” said Ray, before Kane had rounded his neat period. “What an ass I am!”
“We are all asses,” Kane sighed. “It is the great bond of human brotherhood. When did you get these verdicts?”
“Oh, Mr. Brandreth told me Miss Hughes had taken them home with her yesterday, and I couldn’t rest till I had his leave to go and get them of her.”
“Exactly. If we know there is possible unhappiness in store for us, we don’t wait for it; we make haste and look it up, and embrace it. And how did my dear old friend Hughes, if you saw him, impress you this time?”
“I saw him, and I still prefer him to his friends,” said Ray.{168}
“Naturally. There are not many people, even in a planet so overpeopled as this, who are the peers of David Hughes. He goes far to make me respect my species. Of course he is ridiculous. A man so hopeful as Hughes is the reductio ad absurdum of the human proposition. How can there reasonably be hope in a world where poverty and death are? To be sure, Hughes proposes to eliminate poverty and explain death. You know he thinks—he really believes, I suppose—that if he could once get his millenium going, and everybody so blessed in this life that the absolute knowledge of heavenly conditions in another would not tempt us to suicide, then the terror and the mystery of death would be taken away, and the race would be trusted with its benificent meaning. It’s rather a pretty notion.”
Ray, with his narrow experience, would not have been able to grasp it fully. Now he broke out without the least relevancy to it, “I wonder how it would do to remodel my story so far as to transfer the scene to New York? It might be more popular.” The criticism that one of those readers had made on the helplessness of his fidelity to simple rustic conditions had suddenly begun to gall him afresh. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t notice what you were saying! I can’t get my mind off that miserable thing!”
Kane laughed. “Oh, don’t apologize. I know how it is. Perhaps a change of scene would be good; it’s often advised, you know.” He laughed again, and Ray with him, ruefully, and now he rose.{169}
“Oh, must you go?” Ray entreated.
“Yes. You are best alone; when we are in pain we are, alone, anyway. If misery loves company, company certainly does not love misery. I can stand my own troubles, but not other people’s. Good-by! We will meet again when you are happier.{170}”