From one phase of his experience with his story, Ray took a hint, and made bold to ask Mr. Brandreth if he could not give him some manuscripts to read; he had rather a fancy for playing the part of some other man’s destiny since he could have so little to do with deciding his own. Chapley & Co. had not much work of that kind to give, but they turned over a number of novels to him, and he read them with a jealous interest; he wished first of all to find whether other people were writing better novels than his, and he hoped to find that they were not. Mostly, they really were not, and they cumulatively strengthened him against an impulse which he had more than once had to burn his manuscript. From certain of the novels he read he got instruction both of a positive and negative kind; for it was part of his business to look at their construction, and he never did this without mentally revising the weak points of his story, and considering how he could repair them.
There was not a great deal of money in this work; but Ray got ten or fifteen dollars for reading a manuscript and rendering an opinion of it, and kept himself from the depravation of waiting for the turn of the cards. He waited for nothing; he worked contin{210}ually, and he filled up the intervals of the work that was given to him with work that he made for himself. He wrote all sorts of things,—essays, stories, sketches, poems,—and sent them about to the magazines and the weekly newspapers and the syndicates. When the editors were long in reporting upon them, he went and asked for a decision; and in audacious moments he carried his manuscript to them, and tried to surprise an instant judgment from them. This, if it were in the case of a poem, or a very short sketch, he could sometimes get; and it was usually adverse, as it usually was in the case of the things he sent them by mail. They were nowhere unkindly; they were often sympathetic, and suggested that what was not exactly adapted to their publications might be adapted to the publication of a fellow-editor; they were willing to sacrifice one another in his behalf. They did not always refuse his contributions. Kane, who witnessed his struggles at this period with an interest which he declared truly paternal, was much struck by the fact that Ray’s failures and successes exactly corresponded to those of business men; that is, he failed ninety-five times out of a hundred to get his material printed. His effort was not of the vast range suggested by these numbers; he had a few manuscripts that were refused many times over, and made up the large sum of his rejections by the peculiar disfavor that followed them.
Besides these regular attacks on the literary periodicals, Ray carried on guerilla operations of several sorts. He sold jokes at two dollars apiece to the{211} comic papers; it sometimes seemed low for jokes, but the papers paid as much for a poor joke as a good one, and the market was steady. He got rather more for jokes that were ordered of him, as when an editor found himself in possession of an extremely amusing illustration without obvious meaning. He developed a facility wholly unexpected to himself in supplying the meaning for a picture of this kind; if it were a cartoon, he had the courage to ask as much as five dollars for his point.
A mere accident opened up another field of industry to him, when one day a gentleman halted him at the foot of the stairway to an elevated station, and after begging his pardon for first mistaking him for a Grand Army man, professed himself a journalist in momentary difficulty.
“I usually sell my things to the Sunday Planet, but my last poem was too serious for their F. S., and I’m down on my luck. Of course, I see now,” said the journalist in difficulty, “that you couldn’t have been in the war; at first glance I took you for an old comrade of mine; but if you’ll leave your address with me—Thank you, sir! Thank you!”
Ray had put a quarter in his hand, and he thought he had bought the right to ask him a question.
“I know that I may look twice my age when people happen to see double”—
“Capital!” said the veteran. “First-rate!” and he clapped Ray on the shoulder, and then clung to him long enough to recover his balance.{212}
“But would you be good enough to tell me what the F. S. of the Sunday Planet is?”
“Why, the Funny Side—the page where they put the jokes and the comic poetry. F. S. for short. Brevity is the soul of wit, you know.”
Ray hurried home and put together some of the verses that had come back to him from the comic papers, and mailed them to the Sunday Planet. He had learned not to respect his work the less for being rejected, but the Planet did not wane in his esteem because the editor of the F. S. accepted all his outcast verses. The pay was deplorably little, however, and for the first time he was tempted to consider an offer of partnership with a gentleman who wrote advertisements for a living, and who, in the falterings of his genius from overwork, had professed himself willing to share his honors and profits with a younger man; the profits, at any rate, were enormous.
But this temptation endured only for a moment of disheartenment. In all his straits Ray not only did his best, but he kept true to a certain ideal of himself as an artist. There were some things he could not do even to make a living. He might sell anything he wrote, and he might write anything within the bounds of honesty that would sell, but he could not sell his pen, or let it for hire, to be used as the lessee wished. It was not the loftiest grade of æsthetics or ethics, and perhaps the distinctions he made were largely imaginary. But he refused the partnership offered him, though it came with a flattering recognition of his{213} literary abilities, and of his peculiar fitness for the work proposed.
He got to know a good many young fellows who were struggling forward on the same lines with himself, and chancing it high and low with the great monthlies, where they offered their poems and short stories, and with the one-cent dailies, where they turned in their space-work. They had a courage in their risks which he came to share in its gayety, if not its irreverence, and he enjoyed the cheerful cynicism with which they philosophized the facts of the newspaper side of their trade: they had studied its average of successes and failures, and each of them had his secret for surprising the favor of the managing editor, as infallible as the gambler’s plan for breaking the bank at Monaco.
“You don’t want to be serious,” one blithe spirit volunteered for Ray’s instruction in a moment of defeat; “you want to give a light and cheerful cast to things. For instance, if a fireman loses his life in a burning building, you mustn’t go straight for the reader’s pity; you must appeal to his sense of the picturesque. You must call it, ‘Knocked out in a Fight with Fire,’ or something like that, and treat the incident with mingled pathos and humor. If you’ve got a case of suicide by drowning, all you’ve got to do is to call it ‘Launch of one more Unfortunate,’ and the editor is yours. Go round and make studies of our metropolitan civilization; write up the ‘Leisure Moments of Surface-Car Conductors,’ or ‘Talks with the{214} Ticket-Choppers.’ Do the amateur scavenger, and describe the ‘Mysteries of the Average Ash-Barrel.’”
As the time wore on, the circle of Ray’s acquaintance widened so much that he no longer felt those pangs of homesickness which used to seize him whenever he got letters from Midland. He rather neglected his correspondence with Sanderson; the news of parties and sleigh-rides and engagements and marriages which his friend wrote, affected him like echoes from some former life. He was beginning to experience the fascination of the mere city, where once he had a glimpse of the situation fleeting and impalpable as those dream-thoughts that haunt the consciousness on the brink of sleep. Then it was as if all were driving on together, no one knew why or whither; but some had embarked on the weird voyage to waste, and some to amass; their encounter formed the opportunity of both, and a sort of bewildered kindliness existed between them. Their common ignorance of what it was all for was like a bond, and they clung involuntarily together in their unwieldy multitude because of the want of meaning, and prospered on, suffered on, through vast cyclones of excitement that whirled them round and round, and made a kind of pleasant drunkenness in their brains, and consoled them for never resting and never arriving.
The fantastic vision passed, and Ray again saw himself and those around him full of distinctly intended effort, each in his sort, and of relentless energy, which were self-sufficing and self-satisfying. Most of the{215} people he knew were, like himself, bent upon getting a story, or a poem, or an essay, or an article, printed in some magazine or newspaper, or some book into the hands of a publisher. They were all, like himself, making their ninety-five failures out of a hundred endeavors; but they were all courageous, if they were not all gay, and if they thought the proportion of their failures disastrous, they said nothing to show it. They did not try to blink them, but they preferred to celebrate their successes; perhaps the rarity of these merited it more.{216}