The World of Chance

by William Dean Howells

“Yes; but I haven’t been very good company of late. I didn’t want to have it generally known.”

“I understand. Well, now you must cheer up. Good-by, and good luck to you!”

All the means of conveyance were too slow for Ray’s eagerness, and he walked. On his way down to that roaring and seething maelstrom of business, whose fierce currents swept all round the Every Evening office, he painted his future as critic of the journal with minute detail; he had died chief owner and had his statue erected to his memory in Park Square before he crossed that space and plunged into one of the streets beyond.

He was used to newspaper offices, and he was not surprised to find the editorial force of the Every Evening housed in a series of dens, opening one beyond the other till the last, with the chief in it, looked down on the street from which he climbed. He thought it all fit enough, for the present; but, while he still dwelt in the future, and before the office-boy had taken his letter from him to the chief, he swiftly flung up a building for the Every Evening as lofty and as ugly as any of the many-storied towers that rose about the frantic neighborhood. He blundered upon two other writers before he reached the chief; one of them looked up from his desk, and roared at him in unintelligible affliction; the other simply wagged his head, without lifting it, in the direction of the final room, where Ray found himself sitting beside the editor-in-chief, without well knowing how he got there. The editor did not seem to know either, or to care that he was there, for some time; he kept on looking at this thing and that thing on the table before him; at everything but the letter Ray had sent in. When he did take that up he did not look at Ray; and while he talked with him he scarcely glanced at him; there were moments when he seemed to forget there was anybody there; and Ray’s blood began to burn with a sense of personal indignity. He wished to go away, and leave the editor to find him gone at his leisure; but he felt bound to Mr. Brandreth, and he staid. At last the editor took up a book from the litter of newspapers and manuscripts before him, and said:

“What we want is a rapid and attractive résumé of this book, with particular reference to Coquelin and his place on the stage and in art. No one else has the book yet, and we expect to use the article from it in our Saturday edition. See what you can do with it, and bring it here by ten to-morrow. You can run from one to two thousand words—not over two.”

He handed Ray the book and turned so definitively to his papers and letters again that Ray had no choice but to go. He left with the editor a self-respectful parting salutation, which the editor evidently had no use for, and no one showed a consciousness of him, not even the office-boy, as he went out.

He ground his teeth in resentment, but he resolved to take his revenge by making literature of that résumé, and compelling the attention of the editor to him through his work. He lost no time in setting about it; he began to read the book at once, and he had planned his article from it before he reached his hotel. He finished it before he slept, and he went to bed as the first milkman sent his wail through the street below. His heart had worked itself free of its bitterness, and seemed to have imparted its lightness to the little paper, which he was not ashamed of even when he read it after he woke from the short rest he suffered himself. He was sure that the editor of Every Evening must feel the touch which he knew he had imparted to it, and he made his way to him with none of the perturbation, if none of the romantic interest of the day before.

The editor took the long slips which Ray had written his copy on, and struck them open with his right hand while he held them with his left.

“Why the devil,” he demanded, “don’t you write a better hand?” Before Ray could formulate an answer, he shouted again, “Why the devil don’t you begin with a fact?”

He paid no heed to the defence which the hurt author-pride of the young fellow spurred him to make, but went on reading the article through. When he had finished he threw it down and drew toward him a narrow book like a check-book, and wrote in it, and then tore out the page, and gave it to Ray. It was an order on the counting-room for fifteen dollars.