Peace did not come back to her work at the publishers’ for several weeks. The arrears began to accumulate, and Mr. Brandreth asked Ray to help look after it; Ray was now so often with him that their friendly acquaintance had become a confidential intimacy.
Men’s advance in these relations is rapid, even in later life; in youth it is by bounds. Before a week of their daily contact was out, Ray knew that Mrs. Chapley, though the best soul in the world, and the most devoted of mothers and grandmothers, had, in Mr. Brandreth’s opinion, a bad influence on his wife, and through her on his son. She excited Mrs. Brandreth by the long visits she paid her; and she had given the baby medicine on one occasion at least that distinctly had not agreed with it. “That boy has taken so much belladonna, as a preventive of scarlet fever, that I believe it’s beginning to affect his eyes. The pupils are tremendously enlarged, and he doesn’t notice half as much as he did a month ago. I don’t know when Mrs. Chapley will let us have Miss Hughes back again. Of course, I believe in taking precautions too, and I never could forgive myself if anything really happened. But I don’t want to be a{259} perfect slave to my fears, or my mother-in-law’s, either—should you?”
He asked Ray whether, under the circumstances, he did not think he ought to get some little place near New York for the summer, rather than go to his country home in Massachusetts, where the Chapleys had a house, and where his own mother lived the year round. When Ray shrank from the question as too personal for him to deal with, Mr. Brandreth invited him to consider the more abstract proposition that if the two grandmothers had the baby there to quarrel over all summer, they would leave nothing of the baby, and yet would not part friends.
“I’ll tell you another reason why I want to be near my business so as to keep my finger on it all the time, this year,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he went into a long and very frank study of the firm’s affairs with Ray, who listened with the discreet intelligence which made everybody trust him. “With Mr. Chapley in the state he’s got into about business, when he doesn’t care two cents whether school keeps or not, I see that I’ve got to take the reins more and more into my own hands.” Mr. Brandreth branched off into an examination of his own character, and indirectly paid himself some handsome tributes as a business man. “I don’t mean to say,” he concluded, “that I’ve got the experience of some of the older men, but I do mean to say that experience doesn’t count for half of what they claim, in the book business, and I can prove it out of their own mouths. They all admit{260} that nobody can forecast the fate of a book. Of course if you’ve got a book by a known author, you’ve got something to count on, but not so much as people think, and some unknown man may happen along with a thing that hits the popular mood and outsell him ten times over. It’s a perfect lottery.”
“I wonder they let you send your lists of new publications through the mails,” said Ray, dryly.
“Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Though there are a good many blanks too. I suppose the moral difference between business and gambling is that in business you do work for a living, and you don’t propose to give nothing for something, even when you’re buying as cheap as you can to sell as dear as you can. With a book it’s even better. It’s something you’ve put value into, and you have a right to expect to get value out of it. That’s what I tell Mr. Chapley when he gets into one of his Tolstoï moods, and wants to give his money to the poor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”
The two young men laughed at these grotesque conceptions of duty, and Mr. Brandreth went on:
“Yes, sir, if I could get hold of a good, strong, lively novel”—
“Well, there is always A Modern Romeo,” Ray suggested.
Mr. Brandreth winced. “I know.” He added, with the effect of hurrying to get away from the subject, “I’ve had it over and over again with Mr. Chapley till I’m tired of it. Well, I suppose it’s his age,{261} somewhat, too. Every man, when he gets to Mr. Chapley’s time of life, wants to go into the country and live on the land. I’d like to see him living on the land in Hatboro’, Massachusetts! You can stand up in your buggy and count half-a-dozen abandoned farms wherever you’ve a mind to stop on the road. By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, from an association of ideas that Ray easily followed, “have you seen anything of the book that Mr. Hughes is writing? He’s got a good title for it. ‘The World Revisited’ ought to sell the first edition of it at a go.”
“Before people found out what strong meat it was? It condemns the whole structure of society; he’s read me parts of it.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Brandreth, in a certain perplexity, “that might make it go too. People like strong meat. They like to have the structure of society condemned. There’s a good deal of sympathy with the underpinning; there’s no use trying to deny it. Confound it! I should like to try such a book as that in the market. But it would be regarded by everybody who knew him as an outcome of Mr. Chapley’s Tolstoï twist.”
“I understand that Mr. Hughes’s views are entirely opposed to Tolstoï’s. He regards him as unpractical,” said Ray, with a smile for Hughes’s practicality.
“It wouldn’t make any difference. They would call it Tolstoïan on Mr. Chapley’s account. People don’t know. There was Looking Backward; they took that at a gulp, and didn’t know that it was the{262} rankest sort of socialism. My! If I could get hold of a book like Looking Backward!”
“I might have it come out that the wicked cousin in A Modern Romeo was a secret Anarchist. That ought to make the book’s fortune.”
Ray could deal lightly with his rejected novel, but even while he made an open jest of it, the book was still inwardly dear to him. He still had his moments of thinking it a great book, in places. He was always mentally comparing it with other novels that came out, and finding it better. He could not see why they should have got publishers, and his book not; he had to fall back upon that theory of mere luck which first so emboldens and then so embitters the heart; and the hope that lingered in him was mixed with cynicism.{263}