It was that effect of resentment which is lighter even than a touch, the waft of the arrow’s feather; but it could wound a guilty heart, and Mrs. Brinkley sat down where she was, realising with a pang that the time when she might have been everything to this unhappy girl had just passed for ever, and henceforth she could be nothing. She remained musing sadly upon the contradictions she had felt in the girl’s character, the confusion of good and evil, the potentialities of misery and harm, the potentialities of bliss and good; and she felt less and less satisfied with herself. She had really presumed to interfere with Fate; perhaps she had interfered with Providence. She would have given anything to recall her act; and then with a flash she realised that it was quite possible to recall it. She could telegraph Mavering to come; and she rose, humbly and gratefully, as if from an answered prayer, to go and do so.
She was not at all a young woman, and many things had come and gone in her life that ought to have fortified her against surprise; but she wanted to scream like a little frightened girl as Dan Mavering stepped out of the parlour door toward her. The habit of not screaming, however, prevailed, and she made a tolerably successful effort to treat him with decent composure. She gave him a rigid hand. “Where in the world did you come from? Did you get my telegram?”
“No. Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I took a notion to come right on after I wrote, and I started on the same train with it. But they said it was no use trying to get into the Hygeia, and I stopped last night at the little hotel in Hampton. I’ve just walked over, and Mr. Brinkley told me you were out here somewhere. That’s the whole story, I believe.” He gave his nervous laugh, but it seemed to Mrs. Brinkley that it had not much joy in it.
“Hush!” she said involuntarily, receding to her chair and sinking back into it again. He looked surprised. “You know the Van Hooks are gone?”
He laughed harshly. “I should think they were dead from your manner, Mrs. Brinkley. But I didn’t come to see the Van Hooks. What made you think I did?”
He gave her a look which she found so dishonest, so really insincere, that she resolved to abandon him to Providence as soon as she could. “Oh, I didn’t know but there had been some little understanding at Washington.”
“Perhaps on their part. They were people who seemed to take a good many things for granted, but they could hardly expect to control other people’s movements.”
He looked sharply at Mrs. Brinkley, as if to question how much she knew; but she had now measured him, and she said, “Oh! then the visit’s to me?”
“Entirely,” cried Dan. The old sweetness came into his laughing eyes again, and went to Mrs. Brinkley’s heart. She wished him to be happy, somehow; she would have done anything for him; she wished she knew what to do. Ought she to tell him the Pasmers were there? Ought she to make up some excuse and get him away before he met them? She felt herself getting more and more bewildered and helpless. Those women might come round that corner any moment and then she know the first sight of Alice’s face would do or undo everything with Dan. Did she wish them reconciled? Did she wish them for ever parted? She no longer knew what she wished; she only knew that she had no right to wish anything. She continued to talk on with Dan, who grew more and more at ease, and did most of the talking, while Mrs. Brinkley’s whole being narrowed itself to the question. Would the Pasmers come back that way, or would they go round the further corner, and get into the hotel by another door?
The suspense seemed interminable; they must have already gone that other way. Suddenly she heard the pushing back of chairs in that recess. She could not bear it. She jumped to her feet.
“Just wait a moment, Mr. Mavering! I’ll join you again. Mr. Brinkley is expecting — I must—”
One morning of the following June Mrs. Brinkley sat well forward in the beautiful church where Dan and Alice were to be married. The lovely day became a still lovelier day within, enriched by the dyes of the stained windows through which it streamed; the still place was dim yet bright with it; the figures painted on the walls had a soft distinctness; a body of light seemed to irradiate from the depths of the dome like lamp-light.
There was a subdued murmur of voices among the people in the pews: they were in a sacred edifice without being exactly at church, and they might talk; now and then a muffled, nervous laugh escaped. A delicate scent of flowers from the masses in the chancel mixed with the light and the prevailing silence. There was a soft, continuous rustle of drapery as the ladies advanced up the thickly carpeted aisles on the arms of the young ushers and compressed themselves into place in the pews.
Two or three people whom she did not know were put into the pew with Mrs. Brinkley, but she kept her seat next the aisle; presently an usher brought up a lady who sat down beside her, and then for a moment or two seemed to sink and rise, as if on the springs of an intense excitement.
It was Miss Cotton, who, while this process of quiescing lasted, appeared not to know Mrs. Brinkley. When she became aware of her, all was lost again. “Mrs. Brinkley!” she cried, as well as one can cry in whisper. “Is it possible?”
“I have my doubts,” Mrs. Brinkley whispered back. “But we’ll suppose the case.”
“Oh, it’s all too good to be true! How I envy you being the means of bringing them together, Mrs. Brinkley!”
“Means?”
“Yes — they owe it all to you; you needn’t try to deny it; he’s told every one!”
“I was sure she hadn’t,” said Mrs. Brinkley, remembering how Alice had marked an increasing ignorance of any part she might have had in the affair from the first moment of her reconciliation with Dan; she had the effect of feeling that she had sacrificed enough to Mrs. Brinkley; and Mrs. Brinkley had been restored to all the original strength of her conviction that she was a solemn little unconscious egotist, and Dan was as unselfish and good as he was unequal to her exactions.
“Oh no?” said Miss Cotton. “She couldn’t!” implying that Alice would be too delicate to speak of it.
“Do you see any of his family here?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.
“Yes; over there — up front.” Miss Cotton motioned, with her eyes toward a pew in which Mrs. Brinkley distinguished an elderly gentleman’s down-misted bald head and the back of a young lady’s bonnet. “His father and sister; the other’s a bridemaid; mother bed-ridden and couldn’t come.”
“They might have brought her in an-arm-chair,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley ironically, “on such an occasion. But perhaps they don’t take much interest in such a patched-up affair.”
“Oh yes, they do!” exclaimed Miss Cotton. “They idolise Alice.”
“And Mrs. Pasmer and Mister, too?”
“I don’t suppose that so much matters.”
“They know how to acquiesce, I’ve no doubt.”
“Oh yes! You’ve heard? The young people are going abroad first with her family for a year, and then they come back to live with his — where the Works are.”
“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Brinkley.
“Why, Mrs. Brinkley, do you still feel that way?” asked Miss Cotton, with a certain distress. “It seems to me that if ever two young people had the promise of happiness, they have. Just see what their love has done for them already!”
“And you still think that in these cases love can do everything?”
Miss Cotton was about to reply, when she observed that the people about her had stopped talking. The bridegroom, with his best man, in whom his few acquaintances there recognised Boardman with some surprise, came over the chancel from one side.
Miss Cotton bent close to Mrs. Brinkley and whispered rapidly: “Alice found out Mr. Mavering wished it, and insisted on his having him. It was a great concession, but she’s perfectly magnanimous. Poor fellow! how he does look!”
Alice, on her father’s arm, with her bridemaids, of whom the first was Minnie Mavering, mounted the chancel steps, where Mr. Pasmer remained standing till he advanced to give away the bride.
He behaved with great dignity, but seemed deeply affected; the ladies in the front pews said they could see his face twitch; but he never looked handsomer.
The five clergymen came from the back of the chancel in their white surplices. The ceremony proceeded to the end.
The young couple drove at once to the station, where they were to take the train for New York, and wait there a day or two for Mrs. and Mr. Pasmer before they all sailed.
As they drove along, Alice held Dan’s wrist in the cold clutch of her trembling little ungloved hand, on which her wedding ring shone. “O dearest! let us be good!” she said. “I will try my best. I will try not to be exacting and unreasonable, and I know I can. I won’t even make any conditions, if you will always be frank and open with me, and tell me everything.”
He leaned over and kissed her behind the drawn curtains. “I will, Alice! I will indeed! I won’t keep anything from you after this.”
He resolved to tell her all about Julia Anderson at the right moment, when Alice was in the mood, and as soon as he thoroughly understood what he had really meant himself.
If he had been different she would not have asked him to be frank and open; if she had been different, he might have been frank and open. This was the beginning of their married life.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
First published in two volumes in 1890, this novel was well-received for its portrayal of social injustice. Considered by many to be Howells’s best work, the novel is also considered to be the first American novel to portray New York City in detail. Some argue that the novel was the first of three Howells wrote with Socialist and Utopian ideals in mind (the other two being The Quality of Mercy in 1892, and An Imperative Duty in 1893).
The narrative focuses on the dispute between Basil March, who finds himself caught in the middle of a dispute between his employer, the self-made millionaire Dryfoos, and his old teacher Lindau, an advocate of workers’ rights. March and his wife had already featured in Howells’s first novel, Their Wedding Journey.
Through this central story, the novel tackles several important issues of post-Civil-War “Gilded Age” America; issues such as labor disputes, the rise of the self-made millionaire, the consequences of urban growth, the influx of immigrants and other industrial-era problems. Many critics consider A Hazard of New Fortunes to be one of Howells’ most important examples of American literary Realism, portraying a panoply of different individuals of varied backgrounds.
The novel’s title is a reference to William Shakespeare’s King John, a play which portrays themes of uncertainty, change, and violence, which are also important to A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
PART FIRST
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
PART SECOND
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VII.
IX.
X
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
PART THIRD
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII
VIII.
IX.
PART FOURTH
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
PART FIFTH
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
William Dean Howells in 1887
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititious literary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the hero and heroine of ‘Their Wedding Journey’ as the slight fable would bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of ‘Their Wedding Journey,’ they would not respond with the effect of early middle age which I desired in them. They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of that romance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till I tried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under my hand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as people in something more than their second youth.
The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largest canvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though ‘A Hazard of New Fortunes was not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, it was the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. I had the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as it advanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized and amplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though I should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly far off. That shedding of blood which is for the remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast. Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction. I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, of my powers. The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.
The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George’s Church. Then later in the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on the Belmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended. It came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.
There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may trust their fidelity and ac
curacy in the article of New York housing as it was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housing of people of such moderate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth I did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other matters — that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the types here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly different. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of New York housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of the material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two millions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitional public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city’s haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole massive Hercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies with innumerable tops — a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.
Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them false; events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness that might affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were then mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poor have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the material of tragedy and pathos in my story. In my quality of artist I could not regret these, and I gratefully realize that they offered me the opportunity of a more strenuous action, a more impressive catastrophe than I could have achieved without them. They tended to give the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book. As a serial it had crept a sluggish course before a public apparently so unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptance or rejection reached the writer during the half year of its publication; but it rose in book form from that failure and stood upon its feet and went its way to greater favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed. I hope that my recognition of the fact will not seem like boasting, but that the reader will regard it as a special confidence from the author and will let it go no farther.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 382
