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, 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 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.
XXXIII.
When Peace came back to her work, Mr. Brandreth, in admiration of her spirit, confided to Ray that she had refused to take pay for the time she had been away, and that no arguments availed with her.
“They must have been at unusual expense on account of this sickness, and I understand that the son-in-law hasn’t earned anything for a month. But what can you do?”