A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  “It’s for the children we do it,” said Dryfoos. “We got to give them their chance in the world.”

  “Oh, the world! They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we done. I know it’s what Coonrod would like to do.”

  Dryfoos got upon his feet. “If Coonrod’ll mind his own business, and do what I want him to, he’ll have yoke enough to bear.” He moved from his wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out into the dining room. Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the deep drawing room. His feet, in their broad, flat slippers, made no sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there near the piano. Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys, and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument. Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.

  There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos’ traditions and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting room, or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man’s placing his daughter’s hands on a banjo or even holding them there; it would have seemed a proper attention from him if he was courting her. But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty. He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was so. Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine’s happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library, if he could, without being discovered.

  But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young man, came forward. “What you got there, Christine?”

  “A banjo,” said the girl, blushing in her father’s presence.

  Mela gurgled, “Mr. Beaton is learnun’ her the first position.”

  Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in evening dress, and his face, pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse of his broad white shirtfront. He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he had got, and without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine: “No, no. You must keep your hand and arm so.” He held them in position. “There! Now strike with your right hand. See?”

  “I don’t believe I can ever learn,” said the girl, with a fond upward look at him.

  “Oh yes, you can,” said Beaton.

  They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed, and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, “And is the banjo the fashion now?” He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business and associated it with end men, and blackened faces, and grotesque shirtcollars.

  “It’s all the rage,” Mela shouted in answer for all. “Everybody plays it. Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his.”

  “Humph! Pity I got you a piano then,” said Dryfoos. “A banjo would have been cheaper.”

  Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the piano by his mentioning it. He said to Mela, “Oh, won’t you just strike those chords?” And as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys, he took the banjo from Christine and sat down with it. “This way!” He strummed it and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library, while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine’s. “You try that now; it’s very simple.”

  “Where is Mrs. Mandel?” Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.

  Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter they broke into over what Beaton proposed. Then Mela said absently, “Oh, she had to go out to see one of her friends that’s sick,” and she struck the piano keys. “Come; try it, Chris!”

  Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library. He would have liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned against him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him from the art department of Every Other Week at once. But he was aware of not having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own feeling, had he any right to complain? After all, there was no harm in his teaching Christine the banjo.

  His wife still sat looking into the fire. “I can’t see,” she said, “as we’ve got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we’ve got such piles and piles of money. I wisht to gracious we was back on the farm this minute. I wisht you had held out ag‘inst the childern about sellin’ it; ’twould ‘a bin the best thing fur ’em, I say. I believe in my soul they’ll git spoiled here in New York. I kin see a change in ‘em a’ready—in the girls.”

  Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again. “I can’t see as Coonrod is much comfort either. Why ain’t he here with his sisters? What does all that work of his on the East Side amount to? It seems as if he done it to cross me, as much as anything.” Dryfoos complained to his wife on the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives the sense of intellectual equality. He did not expect her to reason with him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the purpose, he still went to her for solace. “Here, I’ve gone into this newspaper business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don’t seem any more satisfied than ever. I can see he hain’t got his heart in it.”

  “The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you. But he give up a good deal when he give up bein’ a preacher; I s’pose we ought to remember that.”

  “A preacher!” sneered Dryfoos. “I reckon bein’ a preacher wouldn’t satisfy him now. He had the impudence to tell me that he would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could be, because I’d kept him from studyin’.”

  “He don’t mean a Catholic priest—not a Roman one, Jacob,” the old woman explained wistfully. “He’s told me all about it. They ain’t the kind o’ Catholics we been used to; some sort of ‘Piscopalians; and they do a heap o’ good amongst the poor folks over there. He says we ain’t got any idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hunderds of ’em in one house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help ‘em like them fathers, as he calls ’em, that gives their lives to it. He can’t be a father, he says, because he can’t git the eddication, now; but he can be a brother; and I can’t find a word to say ag‘inst it, when he gits to talkin’, Jacob.”

  “I ain’t saying anything against his priests, ‘Liz’beth,” said Dryfoos. “They’re all well enough in their way; they’ve given up their lives to it, and it’s a matter of business with them, like any other. But what I’m talking about now is Coonrod. I don’t object to his doin’ all the charity he wants to, and the Lord knows I’ve never been stingy with him about it. He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he pleases.”

  “That’s what I told him once, but he says money ain’t the thing—or not the only thing you got to give to them poor folks. You got to give your time, and your knowledge, and your love—I don’t know what all—you got to give yourself, if you expect to help ’em. That’s what Coonrod says.”

  “Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home,” said Dryfoos, sitting up in his impatience. “And he’d better give himself to us a little—to his old father and mother. And his sisters. What’s he doin’ goin’ off there to his meetings, and I don’t know what all, an’ leavin’ them here alone?”

  “Why, ain’t Mr. Beaton with ’em?” asked the old woman. “I thought I heared his voice.”

  “Mr. Beaton! Of course, he is! And who’s Mr. Beaton anyway?”

  “Why, ain’t he one of the men in Coonrod’s office? I thought I beared—”

  “Yes, he is! But who is he? What’s he doing round here? Is he makin’ up to Christine?”

  “I reckon he is. Fro
m Mely’s talk, she’s about crazy over the fellow. Don’t you like him, Jacob?”

  “I don’t know him, or what he is. He hasn’t got any manners. Who brought him here? How’d he come to come in the first place?”

  “Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe,” said the old woman patiently.

  “Fulkerson!” Dryfoos snorted. “Where’s Mrs. Mandel, I should like to know? He brought her, too. Does she go traipsin’ off this way every evening?”

  “No; she seems to be here pretty regular most o’ the time. I don’t know how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin’ without her. I hope you ain’t thinkin’ o’ turnin’ her off, Jacob?”

  Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question. “It’s all Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson. It seems to me that Fulkerson about runs this family. He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton, and he brought that Boston fellow! I guess I give him a dose, though; and I’ll learn Fulkerson that he can’t have everything his own way. I don’t want anybody to help me spend my money. I made it and I can manage it. I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now. He’s been traveling pretty free, and he’s got the notion he’s driving maybe. I’m a-going to look after that book a little myself.”

  “You’ll kill yourself, Jacob,” said his wife, “tryin’ to do so many things. And what is it all fur? I don’t see as we’re better off any, for all the money. It’s just as much care as it used to be when we was all there on the farm together. I wisht we could go back, Ja—”

  “We can’t go back!” shouted the old man fiercely. “There’s no farm anymore to go back to. The fields is full of gas wells and oil wells and hell holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn’s goin’—”

  “The barn!” gasped the old woman. “Oh, my!”

  “If I was to give all I’m worth this minute, we couldn’t go back to the farm, anymore than them girls in there could go back and be little children. I don’t say we’re any better off for the money. I’ve got more of it now than I ever had; and there’s no end to the luck; it pours in. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don’t know which way to move; I don’t know what’s best to do about anything. The money don’t seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble. We got a big house that we ain’t at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round under our feet that hinder and don’t help. Our children don’t mind us, and we got no friends or neighbors. But it had to be. I couldn’t help but sell the farm, and we can’t go back to it, for it ain’t there. So don’t you say anything more about it, ‘Liz’beth!”

  “Pore Jacob!” said his wife. “Well, I woon’t, dear.”

  IV

  IT WAS CLEAR to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him, and the fact heightened his pleasure in Christine’s liking for him. He was as sure of this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for his pleasure in it. She had her charm, the charm of wildness to which a certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity forced from the old fellow’s love of the girl. Beaton liked the idea of this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it; he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without it; that would be fine. He was taken with her in a certain measure, in a certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.

  It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried downtown and decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed. It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton. After all, it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be final. He found himself very happy in his present relations with her. She had dropped that barrier of pretenses and ironical surprise. It seemed to him that they had gone back to that old ground of common artistic interest which he had found so pleasant the summer before. Apparently she and her mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in the first months of their stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs. Leighton liked him as well as ever, and if there was still something a little provisional in Alma’s manner at times, it was something that piqued more than it discouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.

  He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang. He seemed to be amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said, “Introduce myself, Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson, of Every Other Week. Think I’ve met you at our place.” The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was not very well and would be sorry not to see him. Then she turned, as he felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson, and left him to Miss Woodburn.

  She finally recognized his disappointment: “Ah don’t often get a chance at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah’m just goin’ to toak yo’ to death. Yo’ have been Soath yo’self, and yo’ know ho’ we do toak.”

  “I’ve survived to say yes,” Beaton admitted.

  “Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo’ than you do in the No’th?” the young lady deprecated.

  “I don’t know. I only know you can’t talk too much for me. I should like to hear you say Soath and ho’se and aboat for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton. Now Ah’m goin’ to be personal too.” Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth she was embroidering, and asked him, “Don’t you think that’s beautiful? Now, as an awtust—a great awtust?”

  “As a great awtust, yes,” said Beaton, mimicking her accent. “If I were less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of colors. You’re as bold and original as nature.”

  “Really? Oh, now, do tell me yo’ favo‘ite colo’, Mr. Beaton.”

  “My favorite color? Bless my soul, why should I prefer any? Is blue good, or red wicked? Do people have favorite colors?” Beaton found himself suddenly interested.

  “Of co’se they do,” answered the girl. “Don’t awtusts?”

  “I never heard of one that had—consciously.”

  “Is it possible? I supposed they all had. Now mah favo‘ite colo’ is gawnet. Don’t you think it’s a pretty colo’?”

  “It depends upon how it’s used. Do you mean in neckties?” Beaton stole a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.

  Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist. “Ah do think you gentlemen in the No’th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies.”

  “Strange,” said Beaton. “In the South—Soath, excuse me—I made the observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen. What is that you’re working?”

  “This?” Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt and looked at it with a glance of dawning recognition. “Oh, this is a table covah. Wouldn’t you lahke to see where it’s to go?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “Well, if you’ll be raght good I’ll let yo’ give me some professional advass aboat putting something in the co’ners or not, when you have seen it on the table.”

  She rose and led the way into the other room. Beaton knew she wanted to talk with him about something else, but he waited patiently to let her play her comedy out. She spread the cover on the table, and he advised her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.

  “Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we’ve been having a regular faght aboat it,” she commented. “But we both agreed fahnally to leave it to you; Mr. Fulkerson said you’d be sure to be raght. Ah’m so glad you took mah sahde. But he’s a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded demurely, suggestively.

  “Is he? Well, I’m a great admirer of Fulkerson’s,” said Beaton, with a capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson. “He’s a capital fellow; generous, magn
animous, with quite an ideal of friendship, and an eye single to the main chance all the time. He would advertise Every Other Week on his family vault.”

  Miss Woodburn laughed and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.

  “Do. But he’s used to defamation from me, and he’ll think you’re joking.”

  “Ah suppose,” said Miss Woodburn, “that he’s quahte the tahpe of a New York businessman.” She added, as if it followed logically, “He’s so different from what I thought a New York businessman would be.”

  “It’s your Virginia tradition to despise business,” said Beaton rudely.

  Miss Woodburn laughed again. “Despahse it? Mah goodness! We want to get into it, and ‘work it fo’ all it’s wo’th,’ as Mr. Fulkerson says. That tradition is all past. You don’t know what the Soath is now. Ah suppose mah fathaw despahses business, but he’s a tradition himself, as Ah tell him.” Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for her father’s habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it. “Ah tell him he don’t understand the rising generation. He was brought up in the old school, and he thinks we’re all just lahke he was when he was young, with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family. But mah goodness! It’s money that cyoants no’adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere else. Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit wouldn’t let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can’t have it back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the next best thing.”

  Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the difference of her own and her father’s ideals, but with what Beaton thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of Every Other Week, and Mr. Fulkerson’s relation to the enterprise. “You most excuse my asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton. You know it’s all mah doing that we awe heah in New York. Ah just told my fathaw that if he was evah goin’ to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No‘th, and Ah made him come. Ah believe he’d have staid in the Soath all his lahfe. And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine. We awe a great deal excited aboat it in this ho’se, you know, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson to Alma. She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton’s decision about the table cover.