Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  March answered him. “I guess we must have been waiting for you,

  Fulkerson. At any rate, we hadn’t got to the scolding yet.”

  “Why, I didn’t suppose Mr. Dryfoos could ‘a’ held in so long. I understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you. I inferred as much from a remark that he made.” March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.

  “I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet,” said the old man, dryly.

  “Well, then, I guess it’s a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of what we’ve really done — just while we’re resting, as Artemus Ward says. Heigh, March?”

  “I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson. I think it belongs strictly to the advertising department,” said March. He now distinctly resented the old man’s failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second no sort of appeal for it.

  “The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,” said Fulkerson, hardily, “and I like to keep my hand in with a little practise on the trumpet in private. I don’t believe Mr. Dryfoos has got any idea of the extent of this thing. He’s been out among those Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he’s read the notices in their seven by nine dailies, and he’s seen the thing selling on the cars, and he thinks he appreciates what’s been done. But I should just like to take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him ‘Every Other Week’ on the centre tables of the millionaires — the Vanderbilts and the Astors — and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and let him judge for himself. It’s the talk of the clubs and the dinner-tables; children cry for it; it’s the Castoria of literature and the Pearline of art, the ‘Won’t-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlighteneds man, woman, and child in this vast city. I knew we could capture the country; but, my goodness! I didn’t expect to have New York fall into our hands at a blow. But that’s just exactly what New York has done. ‘Every Other Week’ supplies the long-felt want that’s been grinding round in New York and keeping it awake nights ever since the war. It’s the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals of the past.”

  “How much,” asked Dryfoos, “do you expect to get out of it the first year, if it keeps the start it’s got?”

  “Comes right down to business, every time!” said Fulkerson, referring the characteristic to March with a delighted glance. “Well, sir, if everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs, and it isn’t a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Humph! And you are all going to work a year — editor, manager, publisher, artists, writers, printers, and the rest of ’em — to clear twenty-five thousand dollars? — I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once. I see it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes.” The old man presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.

  His son suggested, “But when we make that money here, no one loses it.”

  “Can you prove that?” His father turned sharply upon him. “Whatever is won is lost. It’s all a game; it don’t make any difference what you bet on. Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his eyes open.”

  “Ah, but the glory!” Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage. “I hadn’t got to the glory yet, because it’s hard to estimate it; but put the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-five thousand, and you’ve got an annual income from ‘Every Other Week’ of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this office to the moon. I don’t mention any of the sister planets because I like to keep within bounds.”

  Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson’s fooling, and said, “That’s what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson — you always keep within bounds.”

  “Well, I ain’t a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here. More sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don’t deny it,” said Fulkerson. “And I do hate to have a thing overstated.”

  “And the glory — you do really think there’s something in the glory that pays?”

  “Not a doubt of it! I shouldn’t care for the paltry return in money,” said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, “if it wasn’t for the glory along with it.”

  “And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along with it?”

  “Well, sir, I’m happy to say we haven’t come to that yet.”

  “Now, Conrad, here,” said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor, “would rather have the glory alone. I believe he don’t even care much for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson.”

  Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad’s face and then March’s, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which would enable him to reach Dryfoos’s whole meaning. He apparently resolved to launch himself upon conjecture. “Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway. I should like to take ’em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks doing here below. And I can’t see but what Conrad runs the thing on business principles in his department, and I guess you’ll find it so if you look into it. I consider that we’re a whole team and big dog under the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do the heavy lying in the advertising part. Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I ‘most forgot Beaton — Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

  Dryfoos looked across at his son. “Wasn’t that the fellow’s name that was there last night?”

  “Yes,” said Conrad.

  The old man rose. “Well, I reckon I got to be going. You ready to go up-town, Conrad?”

  “Well, not quite yet, father.”

  The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his son.

  Fulkerson remained.

  “He didn’t jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,

  Fulkerson,” said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.

  Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, “Didn’t he say anything to you before I came in?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Dogged if I know what to make of it,” sighed Fulkerson, “but I guess he’s been having a talk with Conrad that’s soured on him. I reckon maybe he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this world, and Conrad’s showed himself just as set against it as ever.”

  “It might have been that,” March admitted, pensively. “I fancied something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop.”

  Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:

  “That’s it, then; and it’s all right. Conrad ‘ll come round in time; and all we’ve got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does. I know he likes you.” Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.

  “He dissembled his love,” he said; but afterward, in describing to his wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.

  When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage him. “He’s just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn’t know how to express himself. You may be perfectly sure that he’s delighted with the success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that he owes it all to you.”

  “Ah, I’m not so sure. I don’t believe a man’s any better for having made money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he
’s any wiser. I don’t know just the point he’s reached in his evolution from grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it’s gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he’s come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them — what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t have reached his mental make-up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That’s the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.”

  “No, dear, they never did,” his wife protested.

  “Well, they’re not likely to be in the future. The Dryfoos feature of

  ‘Every Other Week’ is thoroughly distasteful to me.”

  “Why, but he hasn’t really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond furnishing the money?”

  “That’s the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get. But the man that holds the purse holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but when he likes he can drive. If we don’t like his driving, then we can get down.”

  Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the personal aspects involved. “Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived you?”

  “Oh no!” said her husband, laughing. “But I think he has deceived himself, perhaps.”

  “How?” she pursued.

  “He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much so. His courage hadn’t been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can’t tell whether you’ve got it till you try.”

  “Nonsense! Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?”

  “I hope he may not be tempted. But I’d rather be taking the chances with Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing.”

  Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began, “Well, my dear, I never wanted to come to New York—”

  “Neither did I,” March promptly put in.

  “But now that we’re here,” she went on, “I’m not going to have you letting every little thing discourage you. I don’t see what there was in Mr. Dryfoos’s manner to give you any anxiety. He’s just a common, stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn’t know how to express himself, as I said in the beginning, and that’s the reason he didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, I don’t deny you’re right about it.”

  “It’s dreadful,” his wife continued, “to be mixed up with such a man and his family, but I don’t believe he’ll ever meddle with your management, and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as possible, and go quietly on your own way.”

  “Oh, I shall go on quietly enough,” said March. “I hope I sha’n’t begin going stealthily.”

  “Well, my dear,” said Mrs. March, “just let me know when you’re tempted to do that. If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce you.”

  “In view of that I’m rather glad the management of ‘Every Other Week’ involves tastes and not convictions,” said March.

  III.

  That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was Christine’s, and the giggling, which was Mela’s, were intershot with the heavier tones of a man’s voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice. His wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face, waiting for him to wake.

  “Who is that out there?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

  “Indeed, indeed, I don’t know, Jacob,” his wife answered. “I reckon it’s just some visitor of the girls’.”

  “Was I snoring?”

  “Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did hate to have ’em wake you, and I was just goin’ out to shoo them. They’ve been playin’ something, and that made them laugh.”

  “I didn’t know but I had snored,” said the old man, sitting up.

  “No,” said his wife. Then she asked, wistfully, “Was you out at the old place, Jacob?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it look natural?”

  “Yes; mostly. They’re sinking the wells down in the woods pasture.”

  “And — the children’s graves?”

  “They haven’t touched that part. But I reckon we got to have ’em moved to the cemetery. I bought a lot.”

  The old woman began softly to weep. “It does seem too hard that they can’t be let to rest in peace, pore little things. I wanted you and me to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob. Just there, back o’ the beehives and under them shoomakes — my, I can see the very place! And I don’t believe I’ll ever feel at home anywheres else. I woon’t know where I am when the trumpet sounds. I have to think before I can tell where the east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way when I raise? Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!” Her head shook, and the firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress for her pocket.

  A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of chords struck on the piano.

  “Hush! Don’t you cry, ‘Liz’beth!” said Dryfoos. “Here; take my handkerchief. I’ve got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I’m goin’ to have a monument, with two lambs on it — like the one you always liked so much. It ain’t the fashion, any more, to have family buryin’ grounds; they’re collectin’ ’em into the cemeteries, all round.”

  “I reckon I got to bear it,” said his wife, muffling her face in his handkerchief. “And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am. But I always did want to lay just there. You mind how we used to go out and set there, after milkin’, and watch the sun go down, and talk about where their angels was, and try to figger it out?”

  “I remember, ‘Liz’beth.”

  The man’s voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song, insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine’s attempted the same strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.

  “Well, I always did expect to lay there. But I reckon it’s all right. It won’t be a great while, now, anyway. Jacob, I don’t believe I’m a-goin’ to live very long. I know it don’t agree with me here.”

  “Oh, I guess it does, ‘Liz’beth. You’re just a little pulled down with the weather. It’s coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says you’re all right. I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so.”

  “I reckon he don’t know everything,” the old woman persisted: “I’ve been runnin’ down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn’t feel any too well there, even. It’s a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git, the less you ain’t able to stay where you want to, dead or alive.”

  “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’s 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 shirt-front. 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?”