The World of Chance

by William Dean Howells

He got to know a good many young fellows who were struggling forward on the same lines with himself, and chancing it high and low with the great monthlies, where they offered their poems and short stories, and with the one-cent dailies, where they turned in their space-work. They had a courage in their risks which he came to share in its gayety, if not its irreverence, and he enjoyed the cheerful cynicism with which they philosophized the facts of the newspaper side of their trade: they had studied its average of successes and failures, and each of them had his secret for surprising the favor of the managing editor, as infallible as the gambler’s plan for breaking the bank at Monaco.

“You don’t want to be serious,” one blithe spirit volunteered for Ray’s instruction in a moment of defeat; “you want to give a light and cheerful cast to things. For instance, if a fireman loses his life in a burning building, you mustn’t go straight for the reader’s pity; you must appeal to his sense of the picturesque. You must call it, ‘Knocked out in a Fight with Fire,’ or something like that, and treat the incident with mingled pathos and humor. If you’ve got a case of suicide by drowning, all you’ve got to do is to call it ‘Launch of one more Unfortunate,’ and the editor is yours. Go round and make studies of our metropolitan civilization; write up the ‘Leisure Moments of Surface-Car Conductors,’ or ‘Talks with the Ticket-Choppers.’ Do the amateur scavenger, and describe the ‘Mysteries of the Average Ash-Barrel.’”

As the time wore on, the circle of Ray’s acquaintance widened so much that he no longer felt those pangs of homesickness which used to seize him whenever he got letters from Midland. He rather neglected his correspondence with Sanderson; the news of parties and sleigh-rides and engagements and marriages which his friend wrote, affected him like echoes from some former life. He was beginning to experience the fascination of the mere city, where once he had a glimpse of the situation fleeting and impalpable as those dream-thoughts that haunt the consciousness on the brink of sleep. Then it was as if all were driving on together, no one knew why or whither; but some had embarked on the weird voyage to waste, and some to amass; their encounter formed the opportunity of both, and a sort of bewildered kindliness existed between them. Their common ignorance of what it was all for was like a bond, and they clung involuntarily together in their unwieldy multitude because of the want of meaning, and prospered on, suffered on, through vast cyclones of excitement that whirled them round and round, and made a kind of pleasant drunkenness in their brains, and consoled them for never resting and never arriving.

The fantastic vision passed, and Ray again saw himself and those around him full of distinctly intended effort, each in his sort, and of relentless energy, which were self-sufficing and self-satisfying. Most of the people he knew were, like himself, bent upon getting a story, or a poem, or an essay, or an article, printed in some magazine or newspaper, or some book into the hands of a publisher. They were all, like himself, making their ninety-five failures out of a hundred endeavors; but they were all courageous, if they were not all gay, and if they thought the proportion of their failures disastrous, they said nothing to show it. They did not try to blink them, but they preferred to celebrate their successes; perhaps the rarity of these merited it more.

XXVII.

As soon as Ray had pulled himself out of his slough of despond, and began to struggle forward on such footing as he found firm, he felt the rise of the social instinct in him. He went about and delivered his letters; he appeared at one of Mrs. Chapley’s Thursdays, and began to be passed from one afternoon tea to another. He met the Mayquaits at Mrs. Chapley’s, those Gitchigumee people she had asked him about, and at their house he met a lady so securely his senior that she could let him see at once she had taken a great fancy to him. The Mayquaits have since bought a right of way into the heart of society, but they were then in the peripheral circles, and this lady seemed anxious to be accounted for in that strange company of rich outcasts. Something in Ray’s intelligent young good looks must have appealed to her as a possible solvent. As soon as he was presented to her she began to ply him with subtle questions concerning their hostess and their fellow-guests, with whom she professed to find herself by a species of accident springing from their common interest in a certain charity: that particular tea was to promote it. Perhaps it was the steadfast good faith of the pretty boy in refusing to share in her light satire, while he could not help showing that he enjoyed it, which commended Ray more and more to her. He told her how he came to be there, not because she asked, for she did not ask, but because he perceived that she wished to know, and because it is always pleasant to speak about one’s self upon any pretext, and he evinced a delicate sympathy with her misgiving. It flattered him that she should single him out for her appeal as if he were of her sort, and he eagerly accepted an invitation she made him. Through her favor and patronage he began to go to lunches and dinners; he went to balls, and danced sometimes when his pockets were so empty that he walked one way to save his car fares. But his poverty was without care; it did not eat into his heart, for no one else shared it; and those spectres of want and shame which haunt the city’s night, and will not always away at dawn, but remain present to eyes that have watched and wept, vanished in the joyous light that his youth shed about him, as he hurried home with the waltz music beating in his blood. A remote sense, very remote and dim, of something all wrong attended him at moments in his pleasure; at moments it seemed even he who was wrong. But this fled before his analysis; he could not see what harm he was doing. To pass his leisure in the company of well-bred, well-dressed, prosperous, and handsome people was so obviously right and fit that it seemed absurd to suffer any question of it. He met mainly very refined persons, whose interests were all elevated, and whose tastes were often altruistic. He found himself in a set of young people, who loved art and literature and music, and he talked to his heart’s content with agreeable girls about pictures and books and theatres.

It surprised him that with all this opportunity and contiguity he did not fall in love; after the freest give and take of æsthetic sympathies he came away with a kindled fancy and a cold heart. There was one girl he thought would have let him be in love with her if he wished, but when he questioned his soul he found that he did not wish, or could not. He said to himself that it was her money, for she was rich as well as beautiful and wise; and he feigned that if it had not been for her money he might have been in love with her. Her people, an aunt and uncle, whom she lived with, made much of him, and the way seemed clear. They began to tell each other about themselves, and once he interested her very much by the story of his adventures in first coming to New York.

“And did you never meet the two young women afterwards?” she asked.

“Yes. That was the curious part of it,” he said, and piqued that she called them “two young women,” he went on to tell her of the Hugheses, whom he set forth in all the picturesqueness he could command. She listened intensely, and even provoked him with some questions to go on; but at the end she said nothing; and after that she was the same and not the same to him. At first he thought it might be her objection to his knowing such queer people; she was very proud; but he was still made much of by her family, and there was nothing but this difference in her that marked with its delicate distinctness the loss of a chance.

He was not touched except in his vanity. Without the subtle willingness which she had subtly withdrawn, his life was still surpassingly rich on the side where it had been hopelessly poor; and in spite of his personal poverty he was in the enjoyment of a social affluence beyond the magic of mere money. Sometimes he regarded it all as his due, and at all times he took it with simple ingratitude; but he had moments of passionate humility when he realized that he owed his good fortune to the caprice of a worldly old woman, whom he did not respect very much.