A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  “I could see,” said Mela as she and Christine drove home together, “that she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun’ to Mr. Beaton. She pretended to be talkun’ to Conrad, but she kep’ her eye on you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to see how him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied. He’s dead gone on you, Chris.”

  Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill. “Who was that fellow with you so long?” asked Christine. “I suppose you turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do.”

  Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. “It’s a lie! I didn’t tell him a single thing.”

  Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his sisters’ talk of the evening and because there was a tumult in his spirit which he wished to let have its way. In his life with its single purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling partially to fulfill itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child. His ideals were of a virginal vagueness: faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at times, but almost passionlessly; and the sensation that he now indulged was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted. The brutal experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in it and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down from the high heaven. In the heart of this man well on toward thirty there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not entertained them or in anywise made them his. In a Catholic age and country he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after death for the angelic purity of their lives and whose names are invoked by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As he now walked along thinking, with a lover’s beatified smile on his face, of how Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which he approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died to please her for the sake of others. He made her praise him for them to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him. But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration. At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of all other men as far as beyond his own.

  PART FOURTH

  I

  NOT LONG AFTER LENT, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration of the success of Every Other Week. Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical; but Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation known. On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop in at the office on Eleventh Street on his way uptown and listen to Fulkerson’s talk. He was on good enough terms with March, who revised his first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired but did not quite understand; he left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged of it sufficiently. The old man seemed to have as little to say to his son; he shut himself up with Fulkerson where the others could hear the manager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about Every Other Week; Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it, and was always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed.

  The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door, “March, I say, come down here a minute, will you? Conrad, I want you too.”

  The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated on opposite sides of the table. “It’s about those funeral baked meats, you know,” Fulkerson explained, “and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos some idea of what we wanted to do. That is, what I wanted to do,” he continued, turning from March to Dryfoos. “March here is opposed to it of course. He’d like to publish Every Other Week on the sly; keep it out of the papers and off the newsstands; he’s a modest Boston petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb myself, and I want all the publicity we can get—beg, borrow, or steal—for this thing. I say that you can’t work the sacred rites of hospitality in a better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for the purpose of recognizing the hit we’ve made with this thing. My idea was to strike you for the necessary funds and do the thing on a handsome scale. The term little dinner is a mere figure of speech. A little dinner wouldn’t make a big talk, and what we want is the big talk at present, if we don’t lay up a cent. My notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May we should sit down, about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people in the country and solemnize our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I might expand and I might expound, but that’s the sum and substance of it.”

  Fulkerson stopped and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three listeners, one after the other. March was a little surprised when Dryfoos turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give Fulkerson particular pleasure: “What do you think, Mr. March?”

  The editor leaned back in his chair. “I don’t pretend to have Mr. Fulkerson’s genius for advertising, but it seems to me a little early yet. We might celebrate later when we’ve got more to celebrate. At present we’re a pleasing novelty rather than a fixed fact.”

  “Ah, you don’t get the idea!” said Fulkerson. “What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the fact.”

  “Am I going to come in anywhere?” the old man interrupted.

  “You’re going to come in at the head of the procession! We are going to strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing. I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We have had all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the sympathies of the American public the first round. I feel,” said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, “that Every Other Week is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it’s supposed to be my enterprise, my idea. As far as I’m known at all, I’m known simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I’ve got the money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that impression sooner or later, if we don’t give them something else to work up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that you’re in it, with your untold millions—that in fact it was your idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who’s always had these theories of cooperation and longed to realize them for the benefit of our struggling young writers and artists—”

  March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson’s self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when Conrad broke out, “Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that. It would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and—and what I think—what I wish to do—that is something I will not let anyone put me in a false position about. No!” The blood rushed into the young man’s gentle face, and he met his father’s glance with defiance.

  Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson wit
hout speaking, and Fulkerson said caressingly, “Why, of course, Coonrod! I know how you feel, and I shouldn’t let anything of that sort go out un-contradicted afterwards. But there isn’t anything in these times that would give us better standing with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things. The public expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more than to be told that the success of Every Other Week sprang from the first application of the principle of ‘Live and let live’ to a literary enterprise. It would look particularly well coming from you and your father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you approve of the principle I don’t see why you need object. The main thing is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country and that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son. I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father and supply it gratis with the paragraphs.”

  “I guess,” said the old man, “we will get along without the cut.”

  Fulkerson laughed. “Well, well! Have it your own way. But the sight of your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and breadth of this fair land.”

  “There was a fellow,” Dryfoos explained in an aside to March, “that was getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel engraving of me in. He said a good many prominent citizens were going to have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him I couldn’t let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it cash. You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him that I expected him to pay the two hundred.”

  Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke. “Well, sir, I guess Every Other Week will pay you that much. But if you won’t sell at any price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your countenance on the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet.”

  “I don’t seem to feel very hungry yet,” said the old man dryly.

  “Oh, l’appétit vient en mangeant, as our French friends say. You’ll be hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam. It’s too late for oysters.”

  “Doesn’t that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back, sometime in October?” March suggested.

  “No, no!” said Fulkerson. “You don’t catch on to the business end of this thing, my friends. You’re proceeding on something like the old exploded idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he’s watched the course of modern events, that it’s just as apt to be the other way. I contend that we’ve got a real, substantial success to celebrate now; but even if we hadn‘t, the celebration would do more than anything else to create the success, if we got it properly before the public. People will say, ”Those fellows are not fools; they wouldn’t go and rejoice over their magazine unless they had got a big thing in it.’ And the state of feeling we should produce in the public mind would make a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur for E. O. W. Heigh?”

  He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession. The elder Dryfoos said, with his chin on the top of his stick, “I reckon those Little Neck clams will keep.”

  “Well, just as you say,” Fulkerson cheerfully assented. “I understand you to agree to the general principle of a little dinner?”

  “The smaller the better,” said the old man.

  “Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of that seems to cover the case, even if we vary the plan a little. I had thought of a reception, maybe, that would include the lady contributors and artists, and the wives and daughters of the other contributors. That would give us the chance to ring in a lot of society correspondents and get the thing written up in first-class shape. By the way,” cried Fulkerson, slapping himself on the leg, “why not have the dinner and the reception both?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dryfoos.

  “Why, have a select little dinner for ten or twenty choice spirits of the male persuasion, and then about ten o’clock throw open your palatial drawing rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices. It is the very thing! Come!”

  “What do you think of it, Mr. March?” asked Dryfoos, on whose social inexperience Fulkerson’s words projected no very intelligible image and who perhaps hoped for some more light.

  “It’s a beautiful vision,” said March, “and if it will take more time to realize it I think I approve. I approve of anything that will delay Mr. Fulkerson’s advertising orgy.”

  “Then,” Fulkerson pursued, “we could have the pleasure of Miss Christine and Miss Mela’s company; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in the course of the evening. There’s no hurry, as Mr. March suggests, if we can give the thing this shape. I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my honorable colleague.”

  March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he was ashamed of Fulkerson for proposing to make use of Dryfoos and his house in that way. He fancied something appealing in the look that the old man turned on him and something indignant in Conrad’s flush, but probably this was only his fancy. He reflected that neither of them could feel it as people of more worldly knowledge would, and he consoled himself with the fact that Fulkerson was really not such a charlatan as he seemed. But it went through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos’ moneymaking to come to; and he philosophically accepted the fact of his own humble fortunes when he reflected how little his money could buy for such a man. It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in Every Other Week; it might be far more creditably spent on such an enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way than in stocks. He kept a smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these irreverent considerations occupied him and hardened his heart against father and son and their possible emotions.

  The old man rose to put an end to the interview. He only repeated, “I guess those clams will keep till fall.”

  But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progress he had made, and when he joined March for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was able to detach his mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.

  “This is about the best part of the year in New York,” he said. In some of the areas the grass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage had loosened itself from the buds on a sidewalk tree here and there; the soft air was full of spring, and the delicate sky, far aloof, had the look it never wears at any other season. “It ain’t a time of year to complain much of, anywhere; but I don’t want anything better than the month of May in New York. Farther south it’s too hot, and I’ve been in Boston in May when that east wind of yours made every nerve in my body get up and howl. I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with the local temperament. The reason a New York man takes life so easily with all his rush is that his climate don’t worry him. But a Boston man must be rasped the whole while by the edge in his air. That accounts for his sharpness; and when he’s lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays, he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular use for him or he wouldn’t have survived, and that makes him conceited. See?”

  “I see,” said March. “But I don’t know how you’re going to work that idea into an advertisement exactly.”

  “Oh, pshaw, now, March! You don’t think I’ve got that on the brain all the time?”

  “You were gradually leading up to Every Other Week somehow.”

  “No, sir; I wasn’t. I was just thinking what a different creature a Massachusetts man was from a Virginian. And yet I suppose they’re both as pure English stock as you’ll get anywhere in America. March, I think Colonel Woodburn’s paper is going to make a hit.”

  “You’ve got there! When it knocks down the sale about one half, I shall know it’s made a hit.”

  “I’m not afrai
d,” said Fulkerson. “That thing is going to attract attention. It’s well written—you can take the pomposity out of it here and there—and it’s novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it’s going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first place he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual relations of capital and labor; he shows how things have got to go from bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old hobby and proves that if slavery had not been interfered with, it would have perfected itself in the interest of humanity. He makes a pretty strong plea for it.”

  March threw back his head and laughed. “He’s converted you! I swear, Fulkerson, if we had accepted and paid for an article advocating cannibalism as the only resource for getting rid of the superfluous poor, you’d begin to believe in it.”

  Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke and only said, “I wish you could meet the Colonel in the privacy of the domestic circle, March. You’d like him. He’s a splendid old fellow, regular type. Talk about spring! You ought to see the widow’s little backyard these days. You know that glass gallery just beyond the dining room? Those girls have got the pot plants out of that, and a lot more, and they’ve turned the edges of that backyard along the fence into a regular bower; they’ve got sweet peas planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall be in a blaze of glory about the beginning of June. Fun to see ’em work in the garden, and the bird bossing the job in his cage under the cherry tree. Have to keep the middle of the yard for the clothesline, but six days in the week, it’s a lawn, and I go over it with a mower myself. March, there ain’t anything like a home, is there? Dear little cot of your own, heigh? I tell you, March, when I get to pushing that mower round, and the Colonel is smoking his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are pottering over the flowers, one of these soft evenings after dinner, I feel like a human being. Yes, I do. I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals at the widow’s. For eight dollars a week I get good board, refined society, and all the advantages of a Christian home. By the way, you’ve never had much talk with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?”