The World Of Chance. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      The six dollars did not seem to him too much; but he had decided that he must live on ten dollars a week in order to make his money last for a full experiment of New York, or till he had placed himself in some permanent position of profit The two strains of prudence and of poetry were strongly blended in him; he could not bear to think of wasting money, even upon himself, whom he liked so well, and whom he wished so much to have a good time. He meant to make his savings go far; with those five hundred dollars he could live a year in New York if he helped himself out on dress and incidental expenses with the pay for his Midland Echo letters. He would have asked to see some of the rooms in the hotel, but he was afraid it was too early, and he decided to come to dinner and ask about them. On his way back to the place where he had lodged he rapidly counted the cost, and he decided, at any rate, to try it for a while; and he shut himself into his cupboard at the hotel, and began to go over some pages of his manuscript for the last time, with a lightness of heart which decision, even a wrong decision, often brings.

      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, lie 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,

      VI.

      Ray put his manuscript back into its covering and took it under his arm. He meant to make a thorough trial of the publishers, and not to be discouraged by his failures as long as a publisher was left untried. He knew from his experience with the magazine editors that it would be a slow affair, and he must have patience. Some of the publishers, even if they did not look at his story, would keep it for days or weeks with the intention or the appearance of reading it, and if they did read it, they would of course want time for it. He expected this, and he calculated that it might very well take his manuscript six months to go the rounds of all the houses in New York. Yet he meant, if he could, to get it through sooner, and he was going to use his journalistic connection to make interest for it. He would have given everything but honor to have it known that he had written some things for Harper's and the Century; he did not wish, or he said to himself and stood to it that he did not wish, any favor shown his novel because he had written those things. At the same time he was willing the fact that he was the correspondent of the Midland Echo should help him to a prompt examination of his manuscript if it could; and he meant to let it be known that he was a journalist before he let it be known that he was an author.

      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 façades 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 СКАЧАТЬ