Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel door.
“He’s very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It’s very sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn’t want him stringing along up to Forty-second Street with us and spoiling our last moments together.”
At Third Avenue they took the elevated, for which she confessed an infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that the fleeting intimacy you formed with people in second- and third-floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was better than the theater, of which it reminded him, to see those people through their windows: a family party of workfolk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the windowsill together. What suggestion! What drama! What infinite interest! At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long stretch of the elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them; and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam—formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it. They had another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that leads from the elevated station to the waiting rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gaslights that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of the place. What forces, what fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and east and west through the night! Now they waited there like fabled monsters of Arab story ready for the magician’s touch, tractable, reckless, will-less-organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.
The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like. Then they hurried down to the ticket offices, and he got her a lower berth in the Boston sleeper and went with her to the car. They made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and she promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised also that having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only he must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must have an elevator, steam heat, hallboy, and a pleasant janitor. These were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without. But he must get them.
XI
MRS. MARCH WAS one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his absentminded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him there. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer boarding place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing seats at the theater, seeing what the children ate when she was not at table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampened, he had failed her so often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters cited and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his mind and respect for his character. She often said that if he would only bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she had long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did, he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable. She would almost admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness and warning against him. Their mass oppressed but never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.
He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a strange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk than anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other places in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next day in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take less than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was able, in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the background of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether more suitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Green apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far uptown, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is hard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination.
He rang at the last of these uptown apartments as it was falling dusk, and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, like all the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion to his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not mean to take it under any circumstances, that he was going to use his inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity. “If you don’t wish to show the apartment,” he said, “I don’t care to see it.”
The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. He scratched a match on his thigh and led the way up. March was sorry for him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat pocket to give him at parting. At the same time he had to trump up an objection to the flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and he found the number eked out with the bathroom and two large closets. “It’s light enough,” said March, “but I don’t see how you make out ten rooms.”
“There’s ten rooms,” said the man, deigning no proof.
March took his fingers off the quarter and went downstairs and out of the door without ano
ther word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected, with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.
He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure and convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New York.
Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading room, and it gave March the curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said: “Look here! Why don’t you take that woman’s flat in the Xenophon? She’s been at the agents again, and they’ve been at me. She likes your looks—or Mrs. March’s—and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount from the original price. I’m authorized to say you can have it for one seventy-five a month, and I don’t believe it would be safe for you to offer one fifty.”
March shook his head and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his corrupt acquiescence. “It’s too small for us—we couldn’t squeeze into it.”
“Why, look here!” Fulkerson persisted. “How many rooms do you people want?”
“I’ve got to have a place to work—”
“Of course! And you’ve got to have it at The Fifth Wheel office.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” March began. “I suppose I could do my work at the office, as there’s not much writing—”
“Why, of course you can’t do your work at home. You just come round with me now and look at the flat again.”
“No; I can’t do it.”
“Why?”
“I—I’ve got to dine.”
“All right,” said Fulkerson. “Dine with me. I want to take you round to a little Italian place that I know.”
One may trace the successive steps of March’s course in this simple matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process is probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of result is unimportant; the process is everything.
Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of a small dwelling house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern of the lower-middle-class New York home. There were the corroded brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining room appointed for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes and exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back parlor. He rushed at the newcomers, brushed the soiled tablecloth before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl and salad, and the wizened pear and Swiss cheese and coffee, which form the dinner at such places.
“Ah, this is nice!” said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place, and were of all nationalities and religions apparently—at least, several were Hebrews and Cubans. “You get a pretty good slice of New York here,” he said, “all except the frosting on top. That you won’t find much at Maroni’s, though you will occasionally. I don’t mean the ladies ever, of course.” The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking people enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and except in a few instances, not Americans. “It’s like cutting straight down through a fruit cake,” Fulkerson went on, “or a mince pie, when you don’t know who made the pie; you get a little of everything.” He ordered a small flask of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket. March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed. “Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and he thought it was sweet oil; that’s the kind of bottle they used to have it in at the country drugstores.”
“Yes, I remember now; but I’d totally forgotten it,” said March. “How far back that goes! Who’s Dryfoos?”
“Dryfoos?” Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half yard of French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of butter, and fed it into himself. “Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I call him old, but he ain’t so very. About fifty, or along there.”
“No,” said March, “that isn’t very old—or not so old as it used to be.”
“Well, I suppose you’ve got to know about him, anyway,” said Fulkerson thoughtfully. “And I’ve been wondering just how I should tell you. Can’t always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever been out in the natural-gas country?”
“No,” said March. “I’ve had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I’ve never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it as much as we do.”
“Yes, yes,” said Fulkerson. “Well, the natural-gas country is worth seeing. I don’t mean the Pittsburgh gas fields, but out in northern Ohio and Indiana around Moffitt—that’s the place in the heart of the gas region that they’ve been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country. If you haven’t been West for a good many years, you haven’t got any idea how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all full of stumps?”
“I should think so.”
“Well, you won’t see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt is just as smooth as a checkerboard and looks as old as England. You know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a stump extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they just touch ’em off with a little dynamite, and they’ve got a cellar dug and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it. Only they haven’t got any use for kindling in that country—all gas. I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting time, and every once in a while I’d come to a place with a piece of ragged old stovepipe stickin’ up out of the ground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn’t notice it either. Well, they’ve always known about the gas out there; they say there are places in the woods where it’s been burning ever since the country was settled.
“But when you come in sight of Moffitt—my, oh my! Well, you come in smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain’t odorless, like the Pittsburgh gas, and so it’s perfectly safe; but the smell isn’t bad—about as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikes you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there’s been a good warm, growing rain, and the town’s come up overnight. That’s in the suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain’t shabby—no shantytown business; nice brick and frame houses, some of ‘em Queen Anne style, and all of’em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive up from the depot you think everybody’s moving. Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section—half plank road and turnpike, and the rest mudhole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to the public; and a courthouse and jail and two taverns and three or four churches. Well, they’re all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has struck it hard, and they’ve got a lot of new buildings that needn’t be ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new courthouse is as big as St. Peter‘s, and the Grand Opera house is in the highest style of the art. You can’t buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot in New York—or you couldn’t w
hen the boom was on; I saw the place just when the boom was in its prime. I went out there to work the newspapers in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms and showed me everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful too! To see a whole community stirred up like that was—just like a big boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future; nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time—I tell you it warmed your blood. Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together, instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook and devil take the hindmost. They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted their town to grow they’d got to keep their gas public property. So they extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well that was put down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that’s a mind to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gas he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gas you want to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to it for themselves, and as I say, it’s a grand sight to see a whole community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of splitting up into as many different cutthroats as there are able-bodied citizens. See that fellow?” Fulkerscan broke off and indicated with a twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the door. “They say that fellow’s a socialist. I think it’s a shame they’re allowed to come here. If they don’t like the way we manage our affairs, let’em stay at home,” Fulkerson continued. “They do a lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all that, but I’d like to see those fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw each other to death. We don’t want any of their poison.”
A Hazard of New Fortunes Page 11
