“It’s rather pathetic,” Ray suggested.
“Why, I don’t know—I don’t know! Is it so? He hasn’t found out the wrong way without finding the right way at the same time, and he’s buoyantly hopeful in it, though he’s not only an old man; he’s a sick man, too. Of course, he’s poor. He never was a fellow to do things by halves, and when he dispersed his little following he divided nearly all his substance among his disciples. He sees now that the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way; and if he could live long enough, we should see him in Congress—if we lived long enough. Naturally, he is paving the way with a book he’s writing.” Kane went on to speak of his friend at length; he suddenly glanced out of the car window, and said: “Ah, we’re just there. This is our station.”
The avenue had been changing its character as they rushed along. It had ceased to be a street of three or four story houses, where for the most part the people lived over their shops, and where there was an effect of excessive use on everything, a worn-out and shabby look, rather than a squalid look. The cross-streets of towering tenement-houses, had come and gone, and now the buildings were low again, with greater or less gaps between them, while the railroad had climbed higher, and was like a line drawn through the air without reference to the localities which the train left swiftly behind. The houses had begun to be of wood here and there, and it was at a frame of two stories that Mr. Kane stopped with Ray, when they clambered down the long iron staircase of the station to the footway below. They pulled a bell that sounded faintly somewhere within, and the catch of the lock clicked as if it were trying to release itself; but when they tried the door it was still fast, and Mr. Kane rang again. Then a clatter of quick, impatient feet sounded on the stairs; the door was pulled sharply open, and they confronted a tall young man, with a handsome pale face, who bent on them a look of impartial gloom from clouded blue eyes under frowning brows. A heavy fringe of dull yellow hair almost touched their level with its straight line, which the lower lip of the impassioned mouth repeated.
“Ah, Denton!” said Mr. Kane. “Good-morning, good-morning! This is my friend, Mr. Ray.” The young men shook hands with a provisional civility, and Mr. Kane asked, “Are you all at home?”
“We are, at the moment,” said the other. “I’m just going out with the babies; but father will be glad to see you. Come in.”
He had a thick voice that came from his throat by nervous impulses; he set the door open and twisted his head in the direction of the stairs, as if to invite them to go up. They found he had a perambulator in the narrow hall behind the door, and two children facing each other in it. He got it out on the sidewalk without further attention to them, and shut the door after him. But in the light which his struggles to get out had let into the entry they made their way up the stairs, where a woman’s figure stood silhouetted against an open door-way behind her.
“Ah, Mrs. Denton, how do you do?” said Kane, gaily.
The figure answered gaily back, “Oh, Mr. Kane!” and after Kane’s presentation of Ray, set open a door that opened from the landing into the apartment. “Father will be so glad to see you. Please walk in.”
Ray found himself in what must be the principal room of the apartment; its two windows commanded an immediate prospect of the elevated road, with an effect of having their sills against its trestle work. Between them stood a tall, gaunt old man, whose blue eyes flamed under the heavy brows of age, from a face set in a wilding growth of iron-gray hair and beard. He was talking down upon a gentleman whom Ray had black against the light, and he was saying: “No, Henry, no! Tolstoï is mistaken. I don’t object to his theories of non-resistance; the Quakers have found them perfectly practicable for more than two centuries; but I say that in quitting the scene of the moral struggle, and in simplifying himself into a mere peasant, he begs the question as completely as if he had gone into a monastery. He has struck out some tremendous truths, I don’t deny that, and his examination of the conditions of civilization is one of the most terrifically searching studies of the facts that have ever been contributed to the science of sociology; but his conclusions are as wrong as his premises are right. If I had back the years that I have wasted in a perfectly futile effort to deal with the problem of the race at a distance where I couldn’t touch it, I would have nothing to do with eremitism in any of its forms, either collectively as we have had it in our various communistic experiments, or individually on the terms which Tolstoï apparently advises.”
“But I don’t understand him to advise eremitism,” the gentleman began.