A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due dryness to Fulkerson’s cheery “Hello, old man!” when he found himself in the building fitted up for the Every Other Week office. Fulkerson’s room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had been respectively the reception room and dining room of the little place in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow old trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay; they expressed epoch, if not character.

  “Well, have you come around to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere,” Fulkerson went on.

  “I’ve come to bring you that letter,” said Beaton, all the more haughtily because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout, and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped, iron-gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back, with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there was a young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His large blue eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full chin deeply cut below the lip and jutting firmly forward.

  “Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton,” Fulkerson said, rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it toward the younger, he said, “Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton.” Beaton shook hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on gaily: “We were just talking of you, Beaton—well, you know the old saying. Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has charge of the publishing department—he’s the counting room incarnate, the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if there were no money in it.” Mr. Dryfoos turned his large mild eyes upon Beaton and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a character when they do not quite approve of the character’s language. “What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that there won’t be any money in it—or very little; and we’re planning to give the public a better article for the price than it’s ever had before. Now here’s a dummy we’ve had made up for Every Other Week, and as we’ve decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so’s to know what opinion to have of you.” He reached forward and pushed toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book; its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a watercolor design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface, quite across the page at top and narrowing from right to left as it descended. In the triangular space left blank the title of the periodical and the publisher’s imprint were tastefully lettered so as to be partly covered by the background of color.

  “It’s like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet’s,” said Beaton, looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. “But it’s a book, not a magazine.” He opened its pages of thick mellow white paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in the type intended to be used and illustrated with some sketches drawn into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.

  “A Daniel—a Daniel come to judgment! Sit down, Dan‘el, and take it easy.” Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it. “You’re right, Dan’el; it’s a book, to all practical intents and purposes. And what we propose to do with the American public is to give it twenty-four books like this a year—a complete library—for the absurd sum of six dollars. We don’t intend to sell ‘em—it’s no name for the transaction—but to give’em. And what we want to get out of you—beg, borrow, buy, or steal from you—Is an opinion whether we shall make the American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say no more about it. Now, Dan’el, come to judgment, as our respected friend Shylock remarked.”

  Beaton had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from partiality. “I don’t know anything about the business side, and I can’t tell about the effect of either style on the sales, but you’ll spoil the whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that thickish paper.”

  “All right; very good; first-rate. The ayes have it. Paper it is. I don’t mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came in. Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you do about it; and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he’s the counting room incarnate, and it’s cheaper; and I wanted it, because I always like to go with the majority. Now what do you think of that little design itself?”

  “The sketch?” Beaton pulled the book toward him and looked at it again. “Rather decorative. Drawing’s not remarkable. Graceful; rather nice.” He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his side of the table.

  “Well, that’s a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much. I went to a painter I know—by the way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this thing, but I told him I was ahead of him—and I got him to submit my idea to one of his class, and that’s the result. Well, now, there ain’t anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we’re going to have a pretty cover for Every Other Week every time. We’ve cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary-newspaper size, and we’ve cut loose from the old two-column big-page magazine size; we’re going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that’ll make your mouth water; and we’re going to have a fresh illustration for the cover of each number, and we ain’t a-going to give the public any rest at all. Sometimes we’re going to have a delicate little landscape like this, and sometimes we’re going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the law will allow.”

  The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.

  March smiled and said dryly, “Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson is going to edit himself.”

  “Exactly. And Mr. Beaton here is going to supply the floating females, gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind.” Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically: “It’s astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be ashamed to describe accurately; you’re as free as the theater. But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m after is the fact that we’re going to have variety in our title pages, and we’re going to have novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book. March, here, if he had his own way, wouldn’t have any illustrations at all.”

  “Not because I don’t like them, Mr. Beaton,” March interposed, “but because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an illustrated article, but I don’t read the article very much, and I fancy that’s the case with most other people. You’ve got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don’t take our minds off.”

  “Like the society beauties on the stage—people go in for the beauty so much that they don’t know what the play is. But the box office gets there all the same, and that’s what Mr. Dryfoos wants.” Fulkerson looked up gaily at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.

  “It was different,” March went on, “when the illustrations used to be bad. Then the text had some chance.”

  “Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm the galleries,” said Fulkerson.

  “We can still make them bad enough,” said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in his remark to March.

  Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. “Well, you needn’t make ‘em so bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly retiring.
We’ve got hold of a process something like that those French fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use with; kind of thing that begins at one side, or one corner, and spreads in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can’t tell which is which. Then we’ve got a notion that where the pictures don’t behave quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like a little casual remark, don’t you know, or a comment that has some connection, or maybe none at all, with what’s going on in the story. Something like this.” Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long enough to open the drawer and pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beaton. “That’s a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano’s, and I froze to it on account of the pictures. I guess they’re pretty good.”

  “Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?” asked Beaton, after a glance at the book. “Such character—such drama? You won’t.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” said Fulkerson, “come to get our amateurs warmed up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to speak—get that-sized picture into our page and set the fashion of it. I shouldn’t care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial letter and a tailpiece.”

  “Couldn’t be done here. We haven’t the touch. We’re good in some things, but this isn’t in our way,” said Beaton stubbornly. “I can’t think of a man who could do it; that is, amongst those that would.”

  “Well, think of some woman, then,” said Fulkerson easily. “I’ve got a notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get’em interested. There ain’t anything so popular as female fiction; why not try female art?”

  “The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a good while,” March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton remained solemnly silent.

  “Yes, I know,” Fulkerson assented. “But I don’t mean that kind exactly. What we want to do is to work the ewig Weibliche in this concern. We want to make a magazine that will go for the women’s fancy every time. I don’t mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show women triumphing in all the stories or else suffering tremendously. We’ve got to recognize that women form three fourths of the reading public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and get around in the papers that the managers of Every Other Week couldn’t stir a peg in the line of the illustration they wanted till they got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it’ll make the fortune of the thing. See?”

  He looked sunnily around at the other men, and March said: “You ought to be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It’s a disgrace to be connected with you.”

  “It seems to me,” said Beaton, “that you’d better get a God-gifted girl for your art editor.”

  Fulkerson leaned alertly forward and touched him on the shoulder, with a compassionate smile. “My dear boy, they haven’t got the genius of organization. It takes a very masculine man for that—a man who combines the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes and the most ferruginous willpower. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and here he sets!”

  The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and Beaton frowned sheepishly. “I suppose you understand this man’s style,” he growled toward March.

  “They do, my son,” said Fulkerson. “They know that I cannot tell a lie.” He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.

  “It’s quarter of twelve, and I’ve got an appointment.” Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. “Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, and let us hear from you tomorrow. We hang upon your decision.”

  “There’s no deciding to be done,” said Beaton. “You can’t combine the two styles. They’d kill each other.”

  “A Dan‘el, a Dan’el come to judgment! I knew you could help us out! Take’em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the ewig Weibliche. Dryfoos, I want a word with you.” He led the way into the front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.

  VII

  MARCH AND BEATON remained alone together for a moment, and March said: “I hope you will think it worthwhile to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to make a nice thing of the magazine.” He had that timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine. Besides, March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy with him. “We want to make it good; we want to make it high. Fulkerson is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures the way of going about it.”

  For answer, Beaton flung out, “I can’t go in for a thing I don’t understand the plan of.”

  March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility of Beaton’s. He continued, still more deferentially: “Mr. Fulkerson’s notion—I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate experience—Is that we shall do best in fiction to confine ourselves to short stories and make each number complete in itself. He found that the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most people begin with them in fiction; and it’s Mr. Fulkerson’s idea to work unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers. I can’t say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience. We shall not despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all be original, and of course it won’t all be short stories. We shall use sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of biography and history; but all very light and always short enough to be completed in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and most of the things would be capable of illustration.”

  “I see,” said Beaton.

  “I don’t know but this is the whole affair,” said March, beginning to stiffen a little at the young man’s reticence.

  “I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble to explain. Good morning.” Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake hands.

  Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos followed him. “Well, what do you think of our art editor?”

  “Is he our art editor?” asked March. “I wasn’t quite certain when he left.”

  “Did he take the books?”

  “Yes, he took the books.”

  “I guess he’s all right, then.” Fulkerson added in concession to the umbrage he detected in March, “Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but he usually takes it out in personal conduct. When it comes to work, he’s a regular horse.”

  “He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule,” said March.

  “Well, he’s in a transition state,” Fulkerson allowed. “He’s the man for us. He really understands what we want. You’ll see; he’ll catch on. That lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time. He’s really a good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he’s full of ideas. He’s spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he’s pretty thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there’s a good deal of substance to him. Yes, there is. He’s a first-rate critic, and he’s a nice fellow with the other artists. They laugh at his universality, but they all like him. He’s the best kind of a teacher when he condescends to it; and he’s just the man to deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir, he’s a prize. Well, I must go now.”

  Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back. “By
the bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton’s room yesterday.”

  “What old dynamiter of mine?”