“Is it always different?” Alma asked, lifting her head and her hand from her drawing and staring at it absently.
Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers. “Look here! Look here!” he said. “Won’t somebody start some other subject? We haven’t had the weather up, yet, have we? Or the opera? What is the matter with a few remarks about politics?”
“Why, I thoat you lahked to toak about the staff of yo’ magazine,” said Miss Woodburn.
“Oh, I do!” said Fulkerson. “But not always about the same member of it. He gets monotonous, when he doesn’t get complicated. I’ve just come round from the Marches’,” he added, to Mrs. Leighton.
“I suppose they’ve got thoroughly settled in their apartment by this time.” Mrs. Leighton said something like this whenever the Marches were mentioned. At the bottom of her heart she had not forgiven them for not taking her rooms; she had liked their looks so much, and she was always hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied; she could not help wanting them punished a little.
“Well, yes; as much as they ever will be,” Fulkerson answered. “The Boston style is pretty different, you know; and the Marches are old-fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-brac. They’ve put away nine or ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they keep finding new ones.”
“Their landlady has just joined our class,” said Alma. “Isn’t her name Green? She happened to see my copy of Every Other Week, and said she knew the editor, and told me.”
“Well, it’s a little world,” said Fulkerson. “You seem to be touching elbows with everybody. Just think of your having had our head translator for a model.”
“Ah think that your whole publication revolves around the Leighton family,” said Miss Woodburn.
“That’s pretty much so,” Fulkerson admitted. “Anyhow, the publisher seems disposed to do so.”
“Are you the publisher? I thought it was Mr. Dryfoos,” said Alma.
“It is.”
“Oh!”
The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfort which he promptly confessed. “Missed again.”
The girls laughed, and he regained something of his lost spirits and smiled upon their gaiety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it.
Miss Woodburn asked, “And is Mr. Dryfoos senio’ anything like ouah Mr. Dryfoos?”
“Not the least.”
“But he’s jost as exemplary?”
“Yes; in his way.”
“Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah, once.”
“Why, look here! I’ve been thinking I’d celebrate a little, when the old gentleman gets back. Have a little supper—something of that kind. How would you like to let me have your parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton? You ladies could stand on the stairs and have a peep at us, in the bunch.”
“Oh, mah! What a privilege! And will Miss Alma be there, with the othah contributors? Ah shall jost expah of envy!”
“She won’t be there in person,” said Fulkerson, “but she’ll be represented by the head of the art department.”
“Mah goodness! And who’ll the head of the publishing department represent?”
“He can represent you,” said Alma.
“Well, Ah want to be represented someho’.”
“We’ll have the banquet the night before you appear on the cover of our fourth number,” said Fulkerson.
“Ah thoat that was doubly fo’bidden,” said Miss Woodburn. “By the stern parent and the envious awtust.”
“We’ll get Beaton to get round them, somehow. I guess we can trust him to manage that.”
Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.
“I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn’t do himself justice,” she began.
Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke. “Well, maybe he would rather temper justice with mercy in a case like his.” This made both the younger ladies laugh. “I judge this is my chance to get off with my life,” he added, and he rose as he spoke. “Mrs. Leighton, I am about the only man of my sex who doesn’t thirst for Beaton’s blood most of the time. But I know him, and I don’t. He’s more kinds of a good fellow than people generally understand. He don’t wear his heart upon his sleeve—not his ulster sleeve anyway. You can always count me on your side when it’s a question of finding Beaton not guilty if he’ll leave the state.”
Alma set her drawing against the wall in rising to say good night to Fulkerson. He bent over on his stick to look at it. “Well, it’s beautiful,” he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.
Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty. “Thanks to Miss Woodburn.”
“Oh, no! All she had to do was simply to stay put.”
“Don’t you think. Ah might have improved it if Ah had looked better?” the girl asked gravely.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” said Fulkerson. And he went off triumphant in their applause and their cries of “Which? Which?”
Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom when at last she found herself alone with her daughter. “I don’t know what you are thinking about, Alma Leighton. If you don’t like Mr. Beaton—”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t? You know better than that. You know that you did care for him.”
“Oh! That’s a very different thing. That’s a thing that can be got over.”
“Got over!” repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.
“Of course, it can! Don’t be romantic, Mamma. People get over dozens of such fancies. They even marry for love two or three times.”
“Never!” cried her mother, doing her best to feel shocked and at last looking it.
Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. “You can easily get over caring for people; but you can’t get over liking them—if you like them because they are sweet and good. That’s what lasts. I was a simple goose, and he imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose. Now the case is reversed.”
“He does care for you, now. You can see it. Why do you encourage him to come here?”
“I don’t,” said Alma. “I will tell him to keep away if you like. But whether he comes or goes, it will be the same.”
“Not to him, Alma! He is in love with you!”
“He has never said so.”
“And you would really let him say so, when you intend to refuse him?”
“I can’t very well refuse him till he does say so.”
This was undeniable. Mrs. Leighton could only demand in an awful tone, “May I ask why—if you cared for him, and I know you care for him still—you will refuse him?”
Alma laughed. “Because—because I’m wedded to my art, and I’m not going to commit bigamy, whatever I do.”
“Alma!”
“Well, then, because I don’t like him—that is, I don’t believe in him and don’t trust him. He’s fascinating, but he’s false and he’s fickle. He can’t help it, I daresay.”
“And you are perfectly hard. Is it possible that you were actually pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson tease you about Mr. Dryfoos?”
“Oh, good night, now, Mamma! This is becoming personal.”
PART THIRD
I
THE SCHEME OF A BANQUET to celebrate the initial success of Every Other Week expanded in Fulkerson’s fancy into a series. Instead of the publishing and editorial force with certain of the more representative artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton’s parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico’s, with the principal literary and artistic people throughout the country as guests and an inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines; it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self-government in the arts, and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to it. That was what must be done in the speec
hes at the dinner, and the speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was sure would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal, and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the west, and Dryfoos was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other plans.
Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious subjection to another man, but March could not help seeing that in this possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson’s fetish. He did not revere him, March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson’s nature to revere anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect. Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort of bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos’ unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have had its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March, to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him, still somewhat in the sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretense to any advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put money into such an enterprise as Every Other Week and go off about other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety but without any sort of interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not bother him about it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind. He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the American mind and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man grow to his full size so that any man in America could run the concern if necessary. He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck’s shoes and run the German Empire at ten days’ notice or about as long as it would take him to go from New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not know anything about Dryfoos’ plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his hand. Fulkerson himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been up to, since he went west. He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at Chicago, and then he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he had out there, and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again. He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.
Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was going to drop into the office on his way up from the street (March understood this to mean Wall Street) that afternoon. He was tickled to death with Every Other Week so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his respects to the editor.
March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him and prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public reception of the first number. It gave March a disagreeable feeling of being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor, but he fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner and maintained an outward serenity.
He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do so. It was not a question of Dryfoos’ physical presence: that was rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat and which had a history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as soft as March’s and must once have been small even for a man of Mr. Dryfoos’ stature; he was below the average size. But what struck March was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country person and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd speculator. He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of his kind whom he had encountered—some such curiosity as the country school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new schoolmaster. But the whole affair was of course on a higher plane; on one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he probably divined this at once and rested himself upon the fact in a measure. It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.
Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay. “I reckon Mr. March and I haven’t got anything so private to talk about that we want to keep it from the other partners. Well, Mr. March, are you getting used to New York yet?”
“Oh, yes. But not so much time as most places. Everybody belongs more or less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether.”
“Yes, that is so. You can try it and go away if you don’t like it a good deal easier than you could from a smaller place. Wouldn’t make so much talk, would it?” He glanced at March with a jocose light in his shrewd eyes. “That is the way I feel about it all the time: just visiting. Now, it wouldn’t be that way in Boston, I reckon?”
“You couldn’t keep on visiting there your whole life,” said March.
Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple and fierce. “Mr. Fulkerson didn’t hardly know as he could get you to leave. I suppose you got used to it there. I never been in your city.”
“I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage. My wife’s a Bostonian.”
“She’s been a little homesick here, then,” said Dryfoos, with a smile of the same quality as his laugh.
“Less than I expected,” said March. “Of course she was very much attached to our old home.”
“I guess my wife won’t ever get used to New York,” said Dryfoos, and he drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh. “But my girls like it; they’re young. You never been out our way, yet, Mr. March? Out west?”
“Well, only for the purpose of being born and brought up. I used to live in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis.”
“Indianapolis is bound to be a great place,” said Dryfoos. “I remember now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our state.” He went on to brag of the west, as if March were an easterner and had to be convinced. “You ought to see all that country. It’s a great country.”
“Oh, yes,” said March, “I understand that.” He expected the praise of the great west to lead up to some comment on Every Other Week; and there was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of letterpress and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number strewn over his table.
But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things. He rolled his head about on his shoul
ders to take in the character of the room and said to his son, “You didn’t change the woodwork, after all.”
“No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to change the whole place. He liked its being old-fashioned.”
“I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March,” the old man said, bringing his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.
“Too comfortable for a working man,” said March, and he thought that this remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor only smiled again.
“I guess I shan’t lose much on this house,” he returned, as if musing aloud. “This downtown property is coming up. Business is getting in on all these side streets. I thought I paid a pretty good price for it too.” He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which they could really have a common interest. “You live down this way somewhere, don’t you?” the old man concluded.
“Yes. I wished to be near my work.” March was vexed with himself for having recurred to it, but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared his own diffidence in the matter and was waiting for him to bring it openly into the talk. At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement and desired it. He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the old man first an undue pleasure, and then a final distrust. At moments he turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself when his father made it personal.
“I want to make a regular New York businessman out of that fellow,” he said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick. “You s’pose I’m ever going to do it?”
A Hazard of New Fortunes Page 24
