The World of Chance

by William Dean Howells

Besides these regular attacks on the literary periodicals, Ray carried on guerilla operations of several sorts. He sold jokes at two dollars apiece to the comic papers; it sometimes seemed low for jokes, but the papers paid as much for a poor joke as a good one, and the market was steady. He got rather more for jokes that were ordered of him, as when an editor found himself in possession of an extremely amusing illustration without obvious meaning. He developed a facility wholly unexpected to himself in supplying the meaning for a picture of this kind; if it were a cartoon, he had the courage to ask as much as five dollars for his point.

A mere accident opened up another field of industry to him, when one day a gentleman halted him at the foot of the stairway to an elevated station, and after begging his pardon for first mistaking him for a Grand Army man, professed himself a journalist in momentary difficulty.

“I usually sell my things to the Sunday Planet, but my last poem was too serious for their F. S., and I’m down on my luck. Of course, I see now,” said the journalist in difficulty, “that you couldn’t have been in the war; at first glance I took you for an old comrade of mine; but if you’ll leave your address with me—Thank you, sir! Thank you!”

Ray had put a quarter in his hand, and he thought he had bought the right to ask him a question.

“I know that I may look twice my age when people happen to see double”—

“Capital!” said the veteran. “First-rate!” and he clapped Ray on the shoulder, and then clung to him long enough to recover his balance.

“But would you be good enough to tell me what the F. S. of the Sunday Planet is?”

“Why, the Funny Side—the page where they put the jokes and the comic poetry. F. S. for short. Brevity is the soul of wit, you know.”

Ray hurried home and put together some of the verses that had come back to him from the comic papers, and mailed them to the Sunday Planet. He had learned not to respect his work the less for being rejected, but the Planet did not wane in his esteem because the editor of the F. S. accepted all his outcast verses. The pay was deplorably little, however, and for the first time he was tempted to consider an offer of partnership with a gentleman who wrote advertisements for a living, and who, in the falterings of his genius from overwork, had professed himself willing to share his honors and profits with a younger man; the profits, at any rate, were enormous.

But this temptation endured only for a moment of disheartenment. In all his straits Ray not only did his best, but he kept true to a certain ideal of himself as an artist. There were some things he could not do even to make a living. He might sell anything he wrote, and he might write anything within the bounds of honesty that would sell, but he could not sell his pen, or let it for hire, to be used as the lessee wished. It was not the loftiest grade of æsthetics or ethics, and perhaps the distinctions he made were largely imaginary. But he refused the partnership offered him, though it came with a flattering recognition of his literary abilities, and of his peculiar fitness for the work proposed.