Read Ebook: The World of Chance by Howells William Dean

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Ebook has 1420 lines and 89441 words, and 29 pages

ried one while for the car shops, but they located them further up the line, and since that we ha'n't even wiggled. What say? Yes; but, you see, I'm part of the place. I've worked hard all my life, and I've held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but I guess I sha'n't hold out this time. What's the use? Most every business man I know has failed some time or other; some of 'em three or four times over, and scrambled up and gone on again, and I guess I got to do the same. Had a kind of pride about it, m' wife and me; but I guess we got to come to it. It does seem, sometimes, as if the very mischief was in it. I lost pretty heavy, for a small dealer, on Fashion's Pansy, alone--got left with a big lot of 'em. What say? It was a bustle. Women kept askin' for Fashion's Pansy, till you'd 'a' thought every last one of 'em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all at once none of 'em wanted it--wouldn't touch it. That and butter begun it. You know how a country merchant's got to take all the butter the women bring him, and he's got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for grease half the time. You can tell a woman she'd better keep an eye on her daughter, but if you say she don't make good butter, that's the last of that woman's custom. But what's finally knocked me out is this drop in bric-?-brac. If it hadn't been for that, I guess I could have pulled through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so long, that I loaded up all I could with 'em last time I was in New York, and now nobody wants 'em; couldn't give 'em away. Well, it's all a game, and you don't know any more how it's comin' out--you can't bet on it with any more certainty--than you can on a trottin' match. My! I wish I was dead."

The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man again retorted:

"What say? Oh, it's all well enough to preach; and I've heard about the law of demand and supply before. There's about as much of a law to it as there is to three-card monte. If it wasn't for my poor wife, I'd let 'em take me back on ice. I would that."

He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair mattress.

In the morning, Ray determined that he would not breakfast at the restaurant under the hotel, partly because he was ashamed to meet the people who, he knew, suspected him of trying to beat them out of the price of his supper, and partly because he had decided that it was patronized chiefly by the country merchants who frequented the hotel, and he wanted something that was more like New York. He had heard of those foreign eating-houses where you got a meal served in courses at a fixed price, and he wandered about looking for one. He meant to venture into the first he found, and on a side street he came on a hotel with a French name, and over the door in an arch of gilt letters the inscription, Restaurant Fran?ais. There was a large tub on each side of the door, with a small evergreen tree in it; some strings or wires ran from these tubs to the door-posts and sustained a trailing vine that formed a little bower on either hand; a Maltese cat in the attitude of a sphinx dozed in the thicket of foliage, and Ray's heart glowed with a sense of the foreignness of the whole effect. He had never been abroad, but he had read of such things, and he found himself at home in an environment long familiar to his fancy.

Ray felt that it was life, and he prolonged his meal to the last drop of the second cup of coffee that his pot held, and he wished that he could have Sanderson with him to show him what life really was in New York. Sanderson had taken all his meals in the basement of that seventy-five cent hotel, which Ray meant to leave at once. Where he was he would not have been ashamed to have any of the men who had given him that farewell dinner see him. He was properly placed, as a young New York literary man; he was already a citizen of that great Bohemia which he had heard and read so much of. He was sure that artists must come there, and actors, but of course much later in the day. His only misgiving was lest the taxes of Bohemia might be heavier than he could pay, and he asked the waiter for his account somewhat anxiously. It was forty cents, and his ambition leaped at the possibility of taking all his meals at that place. He made the occasion of telling the cross-eyed waiter to keep the change out of the half-dollar he gave him, serve for asking whether one could take board there by the week, and the waiter said one could for six dollars: a luncheon like the breakfast, but with soup and wine, and a dinner of fish, two meats, salad, sweets, and coffee. "On Sundays," said the waiter, "the dinner is something splendid. And there are rooms; oh, yes, it is a hotel."

"Yes, I knew it was a hotel," said Ray.

It was still too soon to go with the story to a publisher; he could not hope to find any one in before ten o'clock, and he had a whole hour yet to work on it. He was always putting the last touches on it; but he almost wished he had not looked at it, now, when the touches must really be the last. It seemed to suffer a sort of disintegration in his mind. It fell into witless and repellent fragments; it lost all beauty and coherence, so that he felt ashamed and frightened with it, and he could not think what the meaning of it had once so clearly been. He knew that no publisher would touch it in the way of business, and he doubted if any would really have it read or looked at. It seemed to him quite insane to offer it, and he had to summon an impudently cynical courage in nerving himself to the point. The best way, of course, would have been to get the story published first as a serial, in one of the magazines that had shown favor to his minor attempts; and Ray had tried this pretty fully. The manuscript had gone the rounds of a good many offices; and returned, after a longer or shorter sojourn, bearing on some marginal corner the hieroglyphic or numerical evidence that it had passed through the reader's hand in each. Ray innocently fancied that he suppressed the fact by clipping this mark away with the scissors; but probably no one was deceived. In looking at it now he was not even deceived himself; the thing had a desperately worn and battered air; it was actually dog's-eared; but he had still clung to the hope of getting it taken somewhere, because in all the refusals there was proof that the magazine reader had really read it through; and Ray argued that if this were so, there must be some interest or property in it that would attract the general reader if it could ever be got to his eye in print.

He was not wrong; for the story was fresh and new, in spite of its simple-hearted, unconscious imitations of the style and plot of other stories, because it was the soul if not the body of his first love. He thought that he had wrapped this fact impenetrably up in so many travesties and disguises that the girl herself would not have known it if she had read it; but very probably she would have known it. Any one who could read between the lines could penetrate through the innocent psychical posing and literary affectation to the truth of conditions strictly and peculiarly American, and it was this which Ray had tried to conceal with all sorts of alien splendors of make and manner. It seemed to him now, at the last moment, that if he could only uproot what was native and indigenous in it, he should make it a strong and perfect thing. He thought of writing it over again, and recoloring the heroine's hair and the hero's character, and putting the scene in a new place; but he had already rewritten it so many times that he was sick of it; and with all his changing he had not been able to change it much. He decided to write a New York novel, and derive the hero from Midland, as soon as he could collect the material; the notion for it had already occurred to him; the hero should come on with a play; but first of all it would be necessary for Ray to get this old novel behind him, and the only way to do that was to get it before the public.

He formulated some phrases introducing himself in his newspaper character, as he walked up Broadway with his manuscript held tight under his arm, and with that lifting and glowing of the heart which a young man cannot help feeling if he walks up Broadway on a bright October morning. The sun was gay on the senseless facades of the edifices, littered with signs of the traffic within, and hung with effigies and emblems of every conceit and color, from the cornice to the threshold, where the show-cases crowded the passengers toward the curbstones, and to the cellarways that overflowed the sidewalks with their wares. The frantic struggle and jumble of these appeals to curiosity and interest jarred themselves to an effect of kaleidoscopic harmony, just as the multitudinous noises of the hoofs and wheels and feet and tongues broke and bruised themselves to one roar on the ear; and the adventurer among them found no offence in their confusion. He had his stake, too, in the tremendous game that all were playing, some fair and some foul, and shrieking out their bets in these strident notes; and he believed so much he should win that he was ready to take the chances of losing. From the stainless blue sky overhead the morning sun glared down on the thronged and noisy street, and brought out all its details with keen distinctness; but Ray did not feel its anarchy. The irregularity of the buildings, high and low, as if they were parts of a wall wantonly hacked and notched, here more and here less, was of the same moral effect to him as the beautiful spire of Grace Church thrilling heavenward like a hymn.

He went along, wondering if he should happen to meet either of those young women whom he had befriended the evening before. He had heard that you were sure to meet somebody you knew whenever you stepped out on Broadway, and he figured meeting them, in fancy. He had decided to put them into his story of New York life, and he tried to imagine the character he should assign them, or rather one of them; the one who had given the old darkey a quarter out of his dollar. He did not quite know what to do with the child; something could be made of the child if it were older, but a mere baby like that would be difficult to manage in such a story as Ray meant to write. He wondered if it would do to have her deserted by her husband, and have the hero, a young literary adventurer, not at all like himself, fall in love with her, and then have them both die when the husband, a worthless, drunken brute, came back in time to prevent their marriage. Such a scheme would give scope for great suffering; Ray imagined a scene of renunciation between the lovers, who refused each other even a last kiss; and he felt a lump rise in his throat. It could be made very powerful.

All the time that this went on in his mind, Ray was walking up Broadway, and holding fast to the novel under his arm, which the novel in his brain was eclipsing. His inner eye was fixed on the remembered face of that strange girl, or woman, whom he was fashioning into a fictitious heroine, but his outward vision roved over the women faces it encountered, and his taste made its swift selection among them, and his ambidextrous fancy wove romances around such, as he found pretty or interesting enough to give his heart to. They were mostly the silly or sordid faces that women wear when they are shopping, and they expressed such emotions as are roused by the chase of a certain shade of ribbon, or the hope of getting something rich and fashionable for less than its worth. But youth is not nice, or else its eyes are keener than those of after-life; and Ray found many beautiful and stylish girls where the middle-aged witness would have seen a long procession of average second-rate young women. He admired their New-Yorky dash; he saw their difference in look and carriage from the Midland girls; and he wondered what they would be like, if he knew them. He reflected that he did not know any one in New York; but he expected soon to be acquainted. If he got his novel taken he would very soon be known, and then his acquaintance would be sought. He saw himself launched upon a brilliant social career, and he suddenly had a difficulty presented to him which he had not foreseen a moment before; he had to choose between a brilliant marriage with a rich and well-born girl and fealty to the weird heroine of his story. The unexpected contingency suggested a new ending to his original story. The husband could die and the lovers be about to marry, when they could become aware that the rich girl was in love with the hero. They could renounce each other, and the hero could marry the rich girl; and shortly after the heroine could die. An ending like that could be made very powerful; and it would be popular, too.

Ray found himself in a jam of people who had begun suddenly to gather at the corner he was approaching. They were looking across at something on the other corner, and Ray looked too. Trunks and travelling-bags had overflowed from a store in the basement there, and piled themselves on the sidewalk and up the house wall; and against the background they formed stood two figures. One was a decent-looking young man in a Derby hat, and wearing spectacles, which gave him a sort of scholarly air; he remained passive in the grip of another, probably the shopman, who was quite colorless with excitement, and who clung fast to the shoulder of the first, as if his prisoner were making violent efforts to escape. A tall young policeman parted the crowd, and listened a moment to the complaint the shopman made, with many gestures toward his wares. Then he turned to the passive captive, and Ray heard the click of the handcuffs as they snapped on the wrists of this scholarly-looking man; and the policeman took him by the arm and led him away.

He crossed to the next corner, where the shopman was the centre of a lessening number of spectators, and found him willing to prolong the interest he had created in the public mind. He said the thief had priced a number of bags in the place below, and on coming up had made a grab at one and tried to get off with it; but he was onto him like lightning. He showed Ray which bag it was, and turned it round and upside down as if with a fresh sense of its moral value. He said he should have to take that bag into court, and he set it aside so that he should not forget it.

"I suppose," said a tall, elderly gentleman, who seemed to have been listening to Ray's dialogue with the shopman, "you wouldn't be willing to sell me that bag?" He spoke slowly with a thick, mellow voice, deep in his throat.

"Money wouldn't buy that bag; no sir," said the shopman; but he seemed uneasy.

"You know," urged the soft-voiced stranger, "you could show some other bag in court that was just like it."

"I couldn't swear to no other bag," said the shopman, daunted, and visibly relenting.

He glanced at Ray with a whimsical demand for sympathy; Ray smiled, and they walked off together, leaving the shopman in dubious study of his eventful bag. He was opening it, and scrutinizing the inside.

The stranger skipped into step with Ray more lightly than would have been expected from one of his years. He wore a soft felt hat over locks of silken silver that were long enough to touch his beautiful white beard. He wore it with an effect of intention, as if he knew it was out of character with the city, but was so much in character with himself that the city must be left to reconcile itself to the incongruity or not, as it chose. For the same reason, apparently, his well-fitting frock-coat was of broadcloth, instead of modern diagonal; a black silk handkerchief tied in an easy knot at his throat strayed from under his beard, which had the same waviness as his hair; he had black trousers, and drab gaiters showing themselves above wide, low shoes. In his hands, which he held behind him, he dangled a stick with an effect of leisure and ease, enhanced somehow by the stoop he made towards the young fellow's lower stature, and by his refusal to lift his voice above a certain pitch, whatever the uproar of the street about them. Ray screamed out his words, but the stranger spoke in what seemed his wonted tone, and left Ray to catch the words as he could.

"I didn't think," he said, after a moment, and with some misgiving, that this stranger who had got into step with him might be some kind of confidence man--"I didn't think that fellow looked like a thief much."

"You are a believer in physiognomy?" asked the stranger, with a philosophic poise. He had himself a regular face, with gay eyes, and a fine pearly tint; lips that must have been beautiful shaped his branching mustache to a whimsical smile.

"No," said Ray. "I wasn't near enough to see his face. But he looked so decent and quiet, and he behaved with so much dignity. Perhaps it was his spectacles."

"Glasses can do much," said the stranger, "to redeem the human countenance, even when worn as a protest against the presence of one's portrait in the rogues' gallery. I don't say you're wrong; I'm only afraid the chances are that you'll never be proved right. I should prefer to make a speculative approach to the facts on another plane. As you suggest, he had a sage and dignified appearance; I observed it myself; he had the effect--how shall I express it?--of some sort of studious rustic. Say he was a belated farm youth, working his way through a fresh-water college, who had great latent gifts of peculation, such as might have won him a wide newspaper celebrity as a defaulter later in life, and under more favorable conditions. He finds himself alone in a great city for the first time, and is attracted by the display of the trunk-dealer's cellarway. The opportunity seems favorable to the acquisition of a neat travelling-bag; perhaps he has never owned one, or he wishes to present it to the object of his affections, or to a sick mother; he may have had any respectable motive; but his outlook has been so restricted that he cannot realize the difference between stealing a travelling-bag and stealing, say, a street; though I believe Mr. Sharp only bought Broadway of those who did not own it, and who sold it low; but never mind, it may stand for an illustration. If this young man had stolen a street, he would not have been arrested and handcuffed in that disgraceful way and led off to the dungeon-keep of the Jefferson Market Police Court--I presume that is the nearest prison, though I won't be quite positive--but he would have had to be attacked and exposed a long time in the newspapers; and he would have had counsel, and the case would have been fought from one tribunal to another, till at last he wouldn't have known whether he was a common criminal or a public benefactor. The difficulty in his case is simply an inadequate outlook."

The philosophic stranger lifted his face and gazed round over Ray's head, but he came to a halt at the same time with the young fellow. "Well, sir," he said, with bland ceremony, "I must bid you good-morning. As we go our several ways let us remember the day's lesson, and when we steal, always steal enough."

He held out his hand, and Ray took it with a pleasure in his discourse which he was wondering how he should express to him. He felt it due himself to say something clever in return, but he could not think of anything. "I'm sure I shall remember your interpretation of it," was all he could get out.

"Ah, well, don't act upon that without due reflection," the stranger said; and he gave Ray's hand a final and impressive downward shake. "Dear me!" he added, for Ray made no sign of going on. "Are we both stopping here--two spiders at the parlor of the same unsuspecting fly? But perhaps you are merely a buyer, not a writer, of books? After you, sir!"

Ray could not help thinking the civility shown him was for an imaginable customer rather than a concealed author, but he accepted it all the same, and sat looking out into the salesroom, with its counters of books, and its shelves full of them around its walls, while he waited. Chapley & Co. were of the few old-fashioned publishers who had remained booksellers too, in a day when most publishers have ceased to be so. They were jobbers as well as booksellers; they took orders and made terms for public and private libraries; they had customers all over the country who depended on them for advice and suggestion about forth-coming books, and there were many booksellers in the smaller cities who bought through them. The bookseller in Midland, who united bookselling with a stationery and music business, was one of these, and he had offered Ray a letter to them.

"If you ever want to get a book published," he said, with a touch on the quick that made the conscious author wince, "they're your men."

Ray knew their imprint and its relative value better than the Midland bookseller, stationer, and music-dealer; and now, as he sat in the junior partner's neat little den, with the letter of introduction in his hand, it seemed to him such a crazy thing to think of having his book brought out by them that he decided not to say anything about it, but to keep to that character of literary newspaper man which his friend gave him in his rather florid letter. He had leisure enough to make this decision and unmake it several times while he was waiting for Mr. Brandreth to come. It was so early that, with all the delays Ray had forced, it was still only a little after nine, and no one came in for a quarter of an hour. The clerks stood about and chatted together. The bookkeepers, in their high-railed enclosure, were opening their ledgers under the shaded gas-burners that helped out the twilight there. Ray could see his unknown street friend scanning the books on the upper shelf and moving his person from side to side, and letting his cane rise and fall behind him as if he were humming to himself and keeping time to the tune.

The distant street door opened at last, and a gentleman came in. His entrance caused an indefinite sensation in the clerks, such as we all feel in the presence of the man who pays our wages. At the sound of his step, Ray's street friend turned about from his shelf, but without offering to leave it.

"Ah, good-morning, good-morning!" he called out; and the other called back, "Ah, good-morning, Mr. Kane!" and pushed on up towards a door near that of Ray's retreat. A clerk stopped him, and after a moment's parley he came in upon the young fellow. He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with whiskers slightly frosted, and some puckers and wrinkles about his temples and at the corners of his mouth, and a sort of withered bloom in his cheeks, something like the hardy self-preservation of the late-hanging apple that people call a frozen-thaw. He was a thin man, who seemed once to have been stouter; he had a gentle presence and a somewhat careworn look.

"Mr. Brandreth?" Ray said, rising.

"No," said the other; "Mr. Chapley."

"Oh, I beg your pardon," said Ray. "They showed me into Mr. Brandreth's room, and I thought"--

"It's quite right, quite right," said Mr. Chapley. "Mr. Brandreth will be in almost any moment if you wish to see him personally." Mr. Chapley glanced at the parcel in Ray's hand.

"Oh no; I have a letter for the firm," and Ray gave it to Mr. Chapley, who read it through and then offered his hand, and said he was glad to meet Mr. Ray. He asked some questions of commonplace friendliness about his correspondent, and he said, with the kind of melancholy which seemed characteristic of him: "So you have come to take a hand in the great game here. Well, if there is anything I can do to serve you, I shall be very glad."

Ray answered promptly, in pursuance of his plan: "You are very kind, Mr. Chapley. I'm going to write letters to the paper I've been connected with in Midland, and I wish to give them largely a literary character. I shall be obliged to you for any literary news you have."

Mr. Chapley seemed relieved of a latent dread. A little knot of anxiety between his eyes came untied; he did not yet go to the length of laying off his light overcoat, but he set his hat down on Mr. Brandreth's desk, and he loosed the grip he had kept of his cane.

"Why, Mr. Brandreth rather looks after that side of the business. He's more in touch with the younger men--with what's going on, in fact, than I am. He can tell you all there is about our own small affairs, and put you in relations with other publishers, if you wish."

"Thank you--" Ray began.

"Not at all; it will be to our advantage, I'm sure. We should be glad to do much more for any friend of our old friends"--Mr. Chapley had to refer to the letter-head of the introduction before he could make sure of his old friends' style--"Schmucker & Wills. I hope they are prospering in these uncertain times?"

Ray said they were doing very well, he believed, and Mr. Chapley went on.

"I am very glad to hear it, very glad, indeed," said Mr. Chapley. "If we can only get this international copyright measure through and dam up the disorganizing tide of cheap publications at its source, we may hope to restore the tone of the trade. As it is, we are ourselves constantly restricting our enterprise as publishers. We scarcely think now of looking at the manuscript of an unknown author."

"Good-morning, Mr. Kane; magnificent day," said the gentleman, who advanced rapidly towards Ray and Mr. Chapley, with a lustrous silk hat on his head, and a brilliant smile on his face. His overcoat hung on his arm, and he looked fresh and warm as if from a long walk. "Ah, good-morning," he said to Mr. Chapley; "how are you this morning, sir?" He bent his head inquiringly towards Ray, who stood a moment while Mr. Chapley got himself together and said:

"This is Mr.--ah--Ray, who brings a letter from our old friends"--he had to glance at the letter-head--"Schmucker & Wills, of--Midland."

"Ah! Midland! yes," said Mr. Brandreth, for Ray felt it was he, although his name had not been mentioned yet. "Very glad to see you, Mr. Ray. When did you leave Midland? Won't you sit down? And you, Mr. Chapley?"

"No, no," said Mr. Chapley, nervously. "I was going to my own room. How is poor Bella this morning?"

"Wonderfully well, wonderfully! I waited for the doctor's visit before I left home, so as to report reliably, and he says he never saw a better convalescence. He promises to let her go out in a fortnight or so, if the weather's good."

"You must be careful! Don't go too fast!" said Mr. Chapley. "And the--child?"

"Perfectly splendid! He slept like a top last night, and we could hardly get him awake for breakfast."

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