The disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted with that part of his poem, and cut it out.{180}
As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.
When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.
The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.{181}
“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have forgiven me by eating salt with us?”
“There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray,” Mrs. Denton called gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.
There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father’s table, and he thought it good enough, even after several years’ sophistication in cities.
“There was to have been steak,” Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look at her husband, “but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn’t want any steak.”
Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and he asked vaguely, “What did he see?”
“Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their rent. I think that after this, when{182} Ansel won’t come home by the Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some good from the exercise. He won’t see families set out on the sidewalk in Fifth Avenue.”
Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and Denton said: “The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better. If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves”—
“Oh, I don’t call salt and potatoes luxury,” exactly, said his wife.
Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his sadness. “I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back rent,” he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent again.
Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. “I recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his blessing.”
“Did he look as if he had got rich begging?” Denton asked.
“No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working,” Ray answered, neatly.{183}
Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.
“You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”
Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery. “Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”
“Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”
“No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with an imperfect hold of her irony.
“There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”
“I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. “I wish they would swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show him what his wealth was based on.”
“It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality. The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not take the chance of suffer{184}ing for himself and his family by relieving the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”
“In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no chance of suffering.”
“No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”
He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript, father,” and brought it to him.
The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.
“Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.{185}
“Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if there was anything to go back to.”
Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent, and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him. Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions. What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”
“Then I don’t see why he objects to the new processes,” said Ray, with the heartlessness which so easily passes for wit. Peace looked at him with grave surprise.
Mrs. Denton laughed over the cat which had got up in her lap. “That’s what I tell him. But it doesn’t satisfy him.”
“You know,” said the younger sister, with a reproach in her tone, which brought Ray sensibly under condemnation, too, “that he means that art must be free before it can be true, and that there can be no freedom where there is the fear of want.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, turning her head for a new effect of the sleeping cat, “there was no fear of{186} want in the Family; but there wasn’t much art, either.”
Ray was tempted to laugh, but he wanted above all to read his poem, and to lead up to it without delay, and he denied himself the pleasure of a giggle with Mrs. Denton. “I suppose,” he said, “the experiment of emancipation is tried on too small a scale in a community.”
“That is what father thinks,” said Peace. “That is why he wants the whole world to be free.”
“Yes,” said Ray, aware of a relenting in her towards himself; and he added, with apparent inconsequence: “Perhaps it would help forward the time for it if every artist could express his feeling about it, or represent it somehow.”
“I don’t see exactly how they could in a picture or a statue,” said Mrs. Denton.
“No,” Ray assented from the blind alley where he had unexpectedly brought up. He broke desperately from it, and said, more toward Peace than toward her sister, “I have been trying to turn my own little disappointment into poetry. You know,” he added, “that Chapley & Co. have declined my book?”
“Yes,” she admitted, with a kind of shyness.
“I wonder,” and here Ray took the manuscript out of his pocket, “whether you would let me read you some passages of my poem.”
Mrs. Denton assented eagerly, and Peace less eagerly, but with an interest that was enough for him. Before he began to read, Mrs. Denton said a number{187} of things that seemed suddenly to have accumulated in her mind, mostly irrelevant; she excused herself for leaving the room, and begged Ray to wait till she came back. Several times during the reading she escaped and returned; the poet finished in one of her absences.{188}