The World Of Chance - William Dean Howells

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advising him to try each week to put by something for a rainy day. There was also a letter from Sanderson, gay with news of all the goings on in Midland, and hilariously regretful of his absence. Sanderson did not say anything about coming to New York to seek his fortune, and the effect of his news was to leave Ray pining for the society of women, which had always been the sweetest thing in life to him, and next to literature the dearest. If he could have had immediate literary success, the excitement of it might have made him forget the privilege he had enjoyed at Midland of going every evening to call on some lovely young girl, and of staying as long as he liked. What made him feel still more lonesome and dropped out was Sanderson's telling of several engagements among the girls they knew in Midland; it appeared to him that he only was destined to go loveless and mateless through life.

      There were women enough in his hotel, but after the first interest of their strangeness, and the romantic effect of hearing them speak in their foreign tongues as if they were at home in them, he could not imagine a farther interest in those opaque Southern blondes, who spoke French, or the brunettes with purple-ringed vast eyes, who coughed out their Spanish gutturals like squirrels. He was appointed a table for his meals in a dining-room that seemed to be reserved for its inmates, as distinguished from the frequenters of the restaurant, who looked as if they were all Americans; and he was served by a shining black waiter weirdly ignorant of English. He gazed wistfully across into the restaurant at times, and had half a mind to ask if he might not eat there; but he liked the glances of curiosity and perhaps envy which its frequenters now and then cast at him in the hotel dining-room. There were no young ladies among them, that he ever saw, but sometimes there were young men whom he thought he would have liked to talk with. Some of them came in company, and at dinner they sat long, discussing matters which he could overhear by snatches were literary and artistic matters. They always came late, and rarely sat down before seven, when Ray was finishing his coffee. One night these comrades came later than usual and in unusual force, and took a large table set somewhat apart from the rest in the bay of a deep window which had once looked out into the little garden of the dwelling that the hotel had once been. They sat down, with a babble of questions and answers, as of people who had not all met for some time, and devoured the little radishes and olives and anchovies, with which the table had been prefatorily furnished, in apparent patience till all the places but the ' head of the table had been taken; then they began to complain and to threaten at the delay of the dinner; Ray was not aware just how a furious controversy suddenly began to rage between two of them. As nearly as he could make out, amidst the rapid thrust and parry of the principals, and the irregular lunges of this one or that of the company which gave it the character of a free fight, it turned upon a point of aesthetics, where the question was whether the moral aspect ought or ought not to be sought in it. In the heat of the debate the chiefs of the discussion talked both at notice, interrupted each other, tried which should clamor loudest and fastest, and then suddenly the whole uproar fell to silence. The two parties casually discovered that they were of exactly the same mind, but each had supposed the other thought differently. Someone came in during the lull that followed, and took the seat at the head of the table.

      It was Mr. Kane, and Ray's heart leaped with the hope that he would see him and recognize him, but out of self-respect he tried to look as if it were not he, but perhaps someone who closely resembled him. He perceived that it was a club dinner of some literary sort; but because he could not help wishing that he were one of the company, he snubbed his desires with unsparing cruelty. He looked down at his plate, and shunned the roving glance which he felt sure Mr. Kane was sending into the room where he now sat almost alone; and he did his best to be ashamed of overhearing the talk now and then. He grew very bitter in his solitude, and he imagined himself using Mr. Kane with great hauteur, after A Modern Romeo had succeeded. He was not obliged to go out that way, when he left the dining-room, but he feigned that he must, and in spite of the lofty stand he had taken with Mr. Kane in fancy, he meanly passed quite near him. Kane looked up, and called out, " Ah, good-evening, good-evening! " and rose and shook hands with him, and asked him how in the world he happened to have found out that restaurant, and he was astonished to hear that Ray was staying in the hotel; he said that was very chic. He introduced him to the company generally, as his young friend Mr. Ray, of Midland, who had come on to cast in his literary lot with them in New York; and then he presented him personally to the nearest on either hand. They were young fellows, but their names were known to Ray with the planetary distinctness that the names of young authors have for literary aspirants, though they are all so nebulous to older eyes.

      Mr. Kane asked Ray to sit down and take his coffee with them; Ray said he had taken his coffee; they all urged that this was no reason why he should not take some more; he stood out against them, like a fool — as he later called himself with gnashing teeth. He pretended he had an engagement, and he left the pleasant company he was hungering so to join, and went out and walked the streets, trying to stay himself with the hope that he had made a better impression than if he had remained and enjoyed himself. He was so lonesome when he came back, and caught the sound of their jolly voices on his way up stairs, that he could hardly keep from going in upon them, and asking if they would let him sit with them. In his room he could not work; he wanted to shed tears in his social isolation. He determined to go back to Midland, at any cost to his feelings or fortunes, or even to the little village where his family lived, and where he had been so restless and unhappy till he could get away from it. Now, any place seemed better than this waste of unknown hundreds of thousands of human beings, where he had not a friend, or even an enemy.

      XII.

      In the morning Ray woke resolved to brace up against the nerveless suspense he had been in ever since he had left his manuscript with Mr. Brandreth, and go and present the letters that some people in Midland had given him to their friends in New York. At least he need not suffer from solitude unless he chose; he wondered if it would do to present his letters on Sunday.

      He breakfasted in this question. Shortly after he went back to his room, there was a knock at his door, and when he shouted " Come in! " it was set softly ajar, and Mr. Kane showed his face at the edge of it.

      "I suppose you know," he said, ignoring Ray's welcome, " or if you haven't been out, you don't know, that this is one of those Sunday mornings which make you feel that it has been blessed and hallowed above all the other days of the week. But I dare say," he added, coming inside, "that the Mohammedans feel exactly so about a particularly fine Friday."

      He glanced round the little room with an air of delicate impartiality, and asked leave to look from Ray's window. As he put his head out, he said to the birds in the eaves, " Ah, sparrows! " as if he knew them personally, before he began to make compliments to the picturesque facts of the prospect Then he stood with his back to Ray, looking down into the street, and praising the fashion of the shadow and sunshine in meeting so solidly there, at all sorts of irregular points and angles. Once he looked round and asked, with the sun making his hair all a shining silver:

      "Has anyone else been shown this view? No? Then let me be the first to utter the stock imbecility that it ought to inspire you if anything could." He put out his head again, and gave a glance upward at the speckless heaven, and then drew it in. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, " a partially clouded sky is better for us, no doubt Why didn't you sit down with us last night? I saw that you wished to do so." He faced Ray benignly, with a remote glimmer of mocking in his eye.

      Ray felt it safest to answer frankly. " Yes, I did want to join you awfully. I overheard a good deal you were saying where I was sitting, but I couldn't accept your invitation. I knew it was a great chance, but I couldn't"

      " Don't you know," Mr. Kane asked, " that the chances have a polite horror of iteration? Those men and those moods may never be got together again. You oughtn't to have thrown such a chance away! "

      " I know," said Ray. " But I had to."

      Mr. Kane leaned back in the chair he had taken, and murmured as if to himself: " Ah, youth, youth! Yes, it has to throw chances away. Waste is a condition of survival. Otherwise we should perish of mere fruition. But could you," he asked, addressing Ray more directly, " without too much loss to the intimacies that every man ought to keep sacred, could you tell

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