The World Of Chance. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ who refused each other even a last kiss; and he felt a lump rise in his throat. It could be made very powerful.

      He evolved a character of reckless generosity for her from her beneficence to the old negro in the ferryboat Under that still, almost cold exterior, he made her conceal a nature of passionate impulse, because the story required a nature of that sort He did not know whether to have the husband finally die, and the lovers marry, or whether to have the lovers killed in an accident. It would be more powerful to have them killed; it would be so conventional and expected to have them happily married; but he knew the reader liked a novel that ended well. It would be at once powerful and popular to have them elope together. Perhaps the best thing he could do would be to have them elope; there was a fascination in the guilty thought; he could make such a denouement very attractive; but upon the whole he felt that he must not, for very much the same reason that he must not himself run off with his neighbor's wife.

      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 anyone 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 comer 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.

      The intrusion of such a brutal fact of life into the tragic atmosphere of his reverie made the young poet a little sick, but the young journalist avidly seized upon it The poet would not have dreamed of using such an incident, but the journalist saw how well it would work into the scheme of that first letter he was writing home to the Echo where he treated of the surface contrasts of life in New York as they present themselves to the stranger. A glad astonishment at the profusion of the material for his letters possessed him; at this rate he should have no trouble in writing them; he could make them an indispensable feature; they would be quoted and copied, and he could get a rise out of Hanks Brothers on the price.

      He crossed to the next comer, where the shopman was the center 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.

      " That is true," said the stranger. " But you could swear that it was exactly like this. Still, I dare say you're quite right, and it's better to produce the corpus delicti, if possible."

      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.

      VII.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ