A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

“That old one-handed Dutchman—friend of your youth—the one we saw at Maroni’s—”

  “Oh—Lindau!” said March, with a vague pang of self-reproach for having thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling toward him was past.

  “Yes; our versatile friend was modeling him as Judas Iscariot. Lindau makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if he works the religious people right. But what I was thinking of was this—it struck me just as I was going out of the door—didn’t you tell me Lindau knew forty or fifty different languages?”

  “Four or five, yes.”

  “Well, we won’t quarrel about the number. The question is, why not work him in the field of foreign literature? You can’t go over all their reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you could trust his nose. Would he know a good thing?”

  “I think he would,” said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson’s suggestion gradually opened. “He used to have good taste, and he must know the ground. Why, it’s a capital idea, Fulkerson! Lindau wrote very fair English; and he could translate, with a little revision.”

  “And he would probably work cheap. Well, hadn’t you better see him about it? I guess it’ll be quite a windfall for him.”

  “Yes, it will. I’ll look him up. Thank you for the suggestion, Fulkerson.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it! I don’t mind doing Every Other Week a good turn now and then when it comes in my way.” Fulkerson went out again, and this time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.

  “Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called the other day. She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular. There was none on your mother’s card.”

  “No, sir,” said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed habitual with him. “She has no day. She’s at home almost every day. She hardly ever goes out.”

  “Might we come some evening?” March asked. “We should be very glad to do that, if she would excuse the informality. Then I could come with Mrs. March.”

  “Mother isn’t very formal,” said the young man. “She would be very glad to see you.”

  “Then we’ll come some night this week, if you will let us. When do you expect your father back?”

  “Not much before Christmas. He’s trying to settle up some things at Moffitt.”

  “And what do you think of our art editor?” asked March, with a smile, for the change of subject.

  “Oh, I don’t know much about such things,” said the young man, with another of his embarrassed flushes. “Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure that he is the one for us.”

  “Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too,” said March; and he laughed. “That’s what makes me doubt his infallibility. But he couldn’t do worse with Mr. Beaton.”

  Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to cope with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March’s self-depreciation. He said, after a moment: “It’s new business to all of us, except Mr. Fulkerson. But I think it will succeed. I think we can do some good in it.”

  March asked, rather absently, “Some good?” Then he added: “Oh yes; I think we can. What do you mean by good? Improve the public taste? Elevate the standard of literature? Give young authors and artists a chance?”

  This was the only good that had ever been in March’s mind, except the good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and to his family.

  “I don’t know,” said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced fashion. He lifted his head and looked into March’s face. “I suppose I was thinking that sometime we might help along. If we were to have those sketches of yours about life in every part of New York—”

  March’s authorial vanity was tickled. “Fulkerson has been talking to you about them? He seemed to think they would be a card. He believes that there’s no subject so fascinating to the general average of people throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion of doing these things.” March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not need this stimulus, and at any rate he went on without it. “The fact is, it’s something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes, consciously and unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I can get something quite attractive out of it. I don’t in the least know what it will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn’t at all say when I can get at it. If we postpone the first number till February I might get a little paper into that. Yes, I think it might be a good thing for us,” March said, with modest self-appreciation.

  “If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems to me that the only trouble is that we don’t know one another well enough; and that the first thing is to do this.” The young fellow spoke with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided. When he laughed his face looked weak, even silly. It seemed to be a sense of this that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.

  “That’s true,” said March, from the surface only. “And then, those phases of low life are immensely picturesque. Of course we must try to get the contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect. That won’t be so easy. You can’t penetrate to the dinner party of a millionaire under the wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry Street, or to his children’s nursery with a philanthropist as you can to a street boys’ lodging house.” March laughed, and again the young man turned his head away. “Still, something can be done in that way by tact and patience.”

  VIII

  THAT EVENING March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos ladies. On their way uptown in the elevated he told her of his talk with young Dryfoos. “I confess I was a little ashamed before him afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view. But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them.”

  “Of course,” said his wife. She had aways heard him say something of this kind about such things.

  He went on: “But I suppose that’s just the point that such a nature as young Dryfoos’ can’t get hold of, or keep hold of. We’re a queer lot down there, Isabel—perfect menagerie. If it hadn’t been that Fulkerson got us together and really seems to know what he did it for, I should say he was the oddest stick among us. But when I think of myself and my own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher; and that young Beaton, who probably hasn’t a moral fiber in his composition, for the art man, I don’t know but we could give Fulkerson odds and still beat him in oddity.”

  His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of monition. “Well, I’m glad you can feel so light about it, Basil.”

  “Light? I feel gay! With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks and the lee shore had better keep out of the way.” He laughed with pleasure in his metaphor. “Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave of his senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most intimate and inalienable terms with them all the time. You know how I’ve been worrying over those foreign periodicals and trying to get some translation from them for the first number? Well, Fulkerson has brought his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he’s suggested that old German friend of mine I was telling you of—the one I met in the restaurant—the friend of my youth.”

  “Do you think he could do it?” asked Mrs. March skeptically.

  “He’s a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he’s the very man for the work, and I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of him myself, for I suspect he needs the work.”

  “Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil,” said his wife, who had the natural
misgiving concerning the friends of her husband’s youth that all wives have. “You know the Germans are so unscrupulously dependent. You don’t know anything about him now.”

  “I’m not afraid of Lindau,” said March. “He was the best and kindest man I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous. He lost a hand in the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of his is character enough for me.”

  “Oh, you don’t think I could have meant anything against him!” said Mrs. March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of the war must feel for those who suffered in it. “All that I meant was that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much. You’re so apt to be carried away by your impulses.”

  “They didn’t carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau, I’m ashamed to think,” said March. “I meant all sorts of fine things by him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of him by Fulkerson.”

  She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which he rehabilitated Lindau anew and provided handsomely for his old age. He got him buried with military honors and had a shaft raised over him, with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by the time they reached Forty-secand Street; there was no time to write Lindau’s life, however briefly, before the train stopped.

  They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived. It was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a huge apartment house dwarfed it again. March thought he recognized the very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did not tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the street, which had been mostly built up in apartment houses, with here and there a single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to that jag-toothed effect on the skyline so often observable in such New York streets. “I don’t know exactly what the old gentleman bought here for,” he said as they waited on the steps after ringing, “unless he expects to turn it into flats by and by. Otherwise, I don’t believe he’ll get his money back.”

  An Irish servingman, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said the ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their cards upstairs. The drawing room, where he said they could sit down while he went on this errand, was delicately decorated in white and gold, and furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was nothing to object to the satin furniture, the pale soft rich carpet, the pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too plainly, and too much of it. The Marches recognized this in the hoarse whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try to talk away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they conjectured from what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury in no wise expressed their civilization. “Though when you come to that,” said March, “I don’t know that Mrs. Green’s gimcrackery expresses ours.”

  “Well, Basil, I didn’t take the gimcrackery. That was your—”

  The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her husband when the question of the gimcrackery—they always called it that—came up. She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking, pretty-looking, mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral implication, who put out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery, very ladylike accent, “Mrs. March?” and then added to both of them, while she shook hands with March, and before they could get the name out of their mouths, “No, not Miss Dryfoos! Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos. Mrs. Mandel. The ladies will be down in a moment. Won’t you throw off your sack, Mrs. March? I’m afraid it’s rather warm here, coming from the outside.”

  “I will throw it back, if you’ll allow me,” said Mrs. March, with a sort of provisionally, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel’s quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going further.

  But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know about her. “Oh, well, do!” she said, with a sort of recognition of the propriety of her caution. “I hope you are feeling a little at home in New York. We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

  “Well, a true Bostonian doesn’t give up quite so soon,” said Mrs. March. “But I will say New York doesn’t seem so far away, now we’re here.”

  “I’m sure you’ll like it. Everyone does.” Mrs. Mandel added to March, “It’s very sharp out, isn’t it?”

  “Rather sharp. But after our Boston winters I don’t know but I ought to repudiate the word.”

  “Ah, wait till you’ve been here through March!” said Mrs. Mandel. She began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark and the little smile of menace that went with it to his wife.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. March, “or April, either. Talk about our east winds!”

  “Oh, I’m sure they can’t be worse than our winds,” Mrs. Mandel returned caressingly.

  “If we escape New York pneumonia,” March laughed, “it will be only to fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the ground.”

  “Oh, but you know,” said Mrs. Mandel, “I think our malaria has really been slandered a little. It’s more a matter of drainage—of plumbing. I don’t believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house, we’ve had it gone over so thoroughly.”

  Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel’s position from this statement, “It’s certainly the first duty.”

  “If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage of our whole ward put in order,” said her husband, “before we ventured to take a furnished apartment for the winter.”

  Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh at this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a second rustling on the stairs.

  Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced, “Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March,” she added, and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.

  Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black. Her face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge. She had a large black fan in her hand, which she waved, in talking, with a slow, watchful nervousness. Her sister was blond and had a profile like her brother’s; but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the mouth was not corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes, though hers were of the same mottled blue. She dropped into the low seat beside Mrs. Mandel and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand which Mrs. Mandel let her have. She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss Dryfoos watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on the other, as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape her.

  “My mother will be down in a minute,” she said to Mrs. March.

  “I hope we’re not disturbing her. It is so good of you to let us come in the evening,” Mrs. March replied.

  “Oh, not at all,” said the girl. “We receive in the evening.”

  “When we do receive,” Miss Mela put in. “We don’t always get the chance to.” She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel, which no one could have seen to be reproving.

  Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan and looked up defiantly at Mrs. March. “I suppose you have hardly got settled. We were afraid we would disturb you when we called.”

  “Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit. We are quite settled in our new quarters. Of course it’s all very different from Boston.”

  “I hope it’s more of a sociable place there,” Miss Mela broke in again. “I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We’ve been in this house three
months, and I don’t believe that if we stayed three years any of the neighbors would call.”

  “I fancy proximity doesn’t count for much in New York,” March suggested.

  Mrs. Mandel said: “That’s what I tell Miss Mela. But she is a very social nature and can’t reconcile herself to the fact.”

  “No, I can’t,” the girl pouted. “I think it was twice as much fun in Moffitt. I wish I was there now.”

  “Yes,” said March, “I think there’s a great deal more enjoyment in those smaller places. There’s not so much going on in the way of public amusements, and so people make more of one another. There are not so many concerts, theaters, operas—”

  “Oh, they’ve got a splendid opera house in Moffitt. It’s just grand,” said Miss Mela.

  “Have you been to the opera here, this winter?” Mrs. March asked of the elder girl.

  She was glaring with a frown at her sister and detached her eyes from her with an effort. “What did you say?” she demanded, with an absent bluntness. “Oh yes. Yes! We went once. Father took a box at the Metropolitan.”

  “Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?” said March.

  “What?” asked the girl.

  “I don’t think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner’s music,” Mrs. Mandel said. “I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Bostan?”

  “I’m a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel. I suspect myself of preferring Verdi,” March answered.

  Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again and said, “I like Trovatore the best.”

  “It’s an opera I never get tired of,” said March; and Mrs. March and Mrs. Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity. He detected it and added, “But I daresay I shall come down with the Wagner fever in time. I’ve been exposed to some malignant cases of it.”

  “That night we were there,” said Miss Mela, “they had to turn the gas down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were awful mad because they couldn’t show their diamonds. I don’t wonder, if they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did. We had to pay sixty dollars.” She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this expense.