“What different kinds of people you meet!” said the girl at last, with an envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common people and made them seem so very much more worthwhile than the people one met.
She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: “You can meet the people I’m talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It’s what they came to New York for. I fancy it’s the great ambition of their lives to be met.”
“Oh, yes,” said Miss Vance fashionably, and looked down; then she looked up and said intellectually: “Don’t you think it’s a great pity? How much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!”
“Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them,” said Beaton. “I don’t suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?”
“No,” said Miss Vance, amused. “Not that I shouldn’t like to go.”
“What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of Every Other Week,” said Beaton.
“The staff—Every Other Week? What is it?”
“The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the Dollars.” Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.
Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson’s insisting upon having him. “And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken of?”
“Tutt’altro! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement.”
“What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity.”
“He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and your name would go into the ’Literary Notes’ of all the newspapers.”
“Oh, but I shouldn’t want my name used!” cried the girl, half horrified into fancying the situation real.
“Then you’d better not say anything about Every Other Week. Fulkerson is preternaturally unscrupulous.”
March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting changes in the makeup of the first number, with a view to its greater vividness of effect. One day he came in and said: “This thing isn’t going to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the first number going for Bevans’ novels. Better get Maxwell to do it.”
“Why, I thought you liked Bevans’ novels?”
“So I do; but where the good of Every Other Week is concerned I am a Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man to do it. There hasn’t been a new magazine started for the last three years that hasn’t had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting Bevans all to pieces. If people don’t see it, they’ll think Every Other Week is some old thing.”
March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested, “Perhaps they’ll think it’s an old thing if they do see it.”
“Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an assumed name. Or—I forgot! He’ll be anonymous under our system anyway. Now there ain’t a more popular racket for us to work in that first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books and quarrel over ’em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like Bevans’ things, but, dad burn it! When it comes to that first number, I’d offer up anybody.”
“What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!” said March, with a laugh.
Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the novelist. “Say,” he called out gaily, “what should you think of a paper defending the late-lamented system of slavery?”
“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” asked March, with a puzzled smile.
Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk and pushed himself back, but kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward. “There’s an old cock over there at the widow’s that’s written a book to prove that slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem. He’s a Southerner.”
“I should imagine,” March assented.
“He’s got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by the commercial spirit and the pseudo-philanthropy of the North, it would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want and protected in all his personal rights by the state. He read the introduction to me last night. I didn’t catch on to all the points—his daughter’s an awfully pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time too, you know—but that’s about the gist of it.”
“Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?” said March.
“Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, heigh? Look well on the title page.”
“Well written?”
“I reckon so; I don’t know. The Colonel read it mighty eloquently.”
“It mightn’t be such bad business,” said March, in a muse. “Could you get me a sight of it without committing yourself?”
“If the Colonel hasn’t sent it off to another publisher this morning. He just got it back with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it traveling.”
“Well, try it. I’ve a notion it might be a curious thing.” “Look here, March,” said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh hold; “I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours for the first number. After all, that’s going to be the great card.”
“I couldn‘t, Fulkerson; I couldn’t, really. I want to philosophize the material, and I’m too new to it all yet. I don’t want to do merely superficial sketches.”
“Of course! Of course! I understand that. Well, I don’t want to hurry you. Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think we ought to have that translation in the first number, don’t you? We want to give ’em a notion of what we’re going to do in that line.”
“Yes,” said March; “and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning. I’ve inquired at Maroni’s, and he hasn’t been there for several days. I’ve some idea perhaps he’s sick. But they gave me his address, and I’m going to see.”
“Well, that’s right. We want the first number to be the keynote in every way.”
March shook his head. “You can’t make it so. The first number is bound to be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes. It’s invariably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the things you’ve seen started. They’re experimental, almost amateurish, and necessarily so, not only because the men that are making them up are comparatively inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent them to deal with is more or less consciously tentative. People send their adventurous things to a new periodical because the whole thing is an adventure. I’ve noticed that quality in all the volunteer contributions; it’s in the articles that have been done to order even. No; I’ve about made up my mind that if we can get one good striking paper into the first number that will take people’s minds off the others, we shall be doing all we can possibly hope for. I should like,” March added less seriously, “to make up three numbers ahead, and publish the third one first.”
Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk. “It’s a first-rate idea. Why not do it?”
March laughed. “Fulkerson, I don’t believe there’s any quackish thing you wouldn’t do in this cause. From time to time I’m thoroughly ashamed of being connected with such a charlatan.”
Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. “Ah, dad burn it! To give that thing the right kind of start I’d walk up and down Broadway between two boards, with the title page of Every Other Week facsimiled on one and my name and address on th
e—” He jumped to his feet and shouted, “March, I’ll do it!”
“What?”
“I’ll hire a lot of fellows to make mud turtles of themselves, and I’ll have a lot of big facsimiles of the title page, and I’ll paint the town red!”
March looked aghast at him. “Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!”
“I mean it. I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of these mud turtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. ‘Cornhill Magazine. Sixpence. Not a dull page in it.’ I said to myself then that it was the livest thing I ever saw. I respected the man that did that thing from the bottom of my heart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But it shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best.”
“You infamous mountebank!” said March, with great amusement at Fulkerson’s access. “You call that congeries of advertising instincts of yours the human mind at its best? Come, don’t be so diffident, Fulkerson. Well, I’m off to find Lindau, and when I come back, I hope Mr. Dryfoos will have you under control. I don’t suppose you’ll be quite sane again till after the first number is out. Perhaps public opinion will sober you then.”
“Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it? I swear I’m getting so nervous I don’t know half the time which end of me is up. I believe if we don’t get that thing out by the first of February, it’ll be the death of me.”
“Couldn’t wait till Washington’s Birthday? I was thinking it would give the day a kind of distinction and strike the public imagination, if—”
“No, I’ll be dogged if I could!” Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement. “I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I’ll kill him.”
“Well, I shouldn’t mind your killing Beaton,” said March tranquilly as he went out.
He went over to Third Avenue and took the elevated down to Chatham Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and characters to his inspection. They draw not only from the uptown American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read that they are worked and fed and housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor must walk; but March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian, stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation centered upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blond dullness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians—fire under ice—were aspects that he identified and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogenous commonwealth. It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this: what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were. These were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced further into the gay ugliness—the shapeless, graceless, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.
There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye which the strident forms and colors made. He was interested in the insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the Corinthian front of an old theater, almost grazing its fluted pillars and flouting its dishonored pediment. The colossal effigies of the fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at their angles; the Swiss-chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around, below, above—were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy. Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the destruction, the decay, of the weaker. The whole at moments seemed to him lawless, Godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to the greater good penetrated with its dumb appeal the conciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapt to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead.
But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square, with a sense of the neglected opportunities of painters in that locality. He said to himself that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars, trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot passengers going and coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad tracks overhead and amidst the spectacular approach of the streets that open into the square, he would have it down in his sketchbook at once. He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated and that he must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do, not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from the same point. He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the shabby-genteel ballad-seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau lived and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade, the sufficient object of an entire study by himself. He had his ballads strung singly upon a cord against the house wall and held down in piles on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment. They were mostly tragical or doleful; some of them dealt with the wrongs of the working man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas; but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents of the end man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary American speech, it was to strike directly for t
he affections, to celebrate the domestic ties, and above all, to embalm the memories of angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings too late. March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled in patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and martyr motherhood and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand. He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vender so deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau’s dwelling by the best way that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absentmindedness stung him to retort, “I’m a-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question; that’s where the absentminded comes in.”
A Hazard of New Fortunes Page 21
