Entire PG Edition of The Works of William Dean Howells
by
William Dean Howells
Part 44 out of 78
He sees now that he had no business to speak to you as he did, and he
withdraws everything. He'd 'a' come round himself if I'd said so, but I
told him I could make it all right."
Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affair put right, and the
Marches knew him to be so kindly affected toward them, that they could
not refuse for the moment to share his mood. They felt themselves
slipping down from the moral height which they had gained, and March made
a clutch to stay himself with the question, "And Lindau?"
"Well," said Fulkerson, "he's going to leave Lindau to me. You won't
have anything to do with it. I'll let the old fellow down easy."
"Do you mean," asked March, "that Mr. Dryfoos insists on his being
dismissed?"
"Why, there isn't any dismissing about it," Fulkerson argued. "If you
don't send him any more work, he won't do any more, that's all. Or if he
comes round, you can--He's to be referred to me."
March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, felt herself plucked up
from the soft circumstance of their lives, which she had sunk back into
so quickly, and set beside him on that cold peak of principle again.
"It won't do, Fulkerson. It's very good of you, and all that, but it
comes to the same thing in the end. I could have gone on without any
apology from Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority, but that's a
minor matter. I could have excused it to his ignorance of life among
gentlemen; but I can't consent to Lindau's dismissal--it comes to that,
whether you do it or I do it, and whether it's a positive or a negative
thing--because he holds this opinion or that."
"But don't you see," said Fulkerson, "that it's just Lindau's opinions
the old man can't stand? He hasn't got anything against him personally.
I don't suppose there's anybody that appreciates Lindau in some ways more
than the old man does."
"I understand. He wants to punish him for his opinions. Well, I can't
consent to that, directly or indirectly. We don't print his opinions,
and he has a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with
them or not."
Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now
went and sat down in the chair next her husband.
"Ah, dog on it!" cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands.
"What am I to do? The old man says he's got to go."
"And I don't consent to his going," said March.
"And you won't stay if he goes."
Fulkerson rose. "Well, well! I've got to see about it. I'm afraid the
old man won't stand it, March; I am, indeed. I wish you'd reconsider.
I--I'd take it as a personal favor if you would. It leaves me in a fix.
You see I've got to side with one or the other."
March made no reply to this, except to say, "Yes, you must stand by him,
or you must stand by me."
"Well, well! Hold on awhile! I'll see you in the morning. Don't take
any steps--"
"Oh, there are no steps to take," said March, with a melancholy smile.
"The steps are stopped; that's all." He sank back into his chair when
Fulkerson was gone and drew a long breath. "This is pretty rough. I
thought we had got through it."
"No," said his wife. "It seems as if I had to make the fight all over
again."
"Well, it's a good thing it's a holy war."
"I can't bear the suspense. Why didn't you tell him outright you
wouldn't go back on any terms?"
"I might as well, and got the glory. He'll never move Dryfoos. I
suppose we both would like to go back, if we could."
"Oh, I suppose so."
They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity. At
dinner Mrs. March asked the children how they would like to go back to
Boston to live.
"Why, we're not going, are we?" asked Tom, without enthusiasm.
"I was just wondering how you felt about it, now," she said, with an
underlook at her husband.
"Well, if we go back," said Bella, "I want to live on the Back Bay. It's
awfully Micky at the South End."
"I suppose I should go to Harvard," said Tom, "and I'd room out at
Cambridge. It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay."
The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand
expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in
meeting Dryfoos's wishes. He proposed the theatre as a distraction from
the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife. "We might
go to the 'Old Homestead,'" he suggested, with a sad irony, which only
his wife felt.
"Oh yes, let's!" cried Bella.
While they were getting ready, some one rang, and Bella went to the door,
and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau. "He says he
wants to see you just a moment. He's in the parlor, and he won't sit
down, or anything."
"What can he want?" groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.
March apprehended a storm in the old man's face. But he only stood in
the middle of the room, looking very sad and grave. "You are Going
oudt," he said. "I won't geep you long. I haf gome to pring pack dose
macassines and dis mawney. I can't do any more voark for you; and I
can't geep the mawney you haf baid me a'ready. It iss not hawnest mawney
--that hass been oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py
sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor,
py a man--Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent. Dake it; I feel as if
dere vas ploodt on it."
"Why, Lindau," March began, but the old man interrupted him.
"Ton't dalk to me, Passil! I could not haf believedt it of you. When
you know how I feel about dose tings, why tidn't you dell me whose mawney
you bay oudt to me? Ach, I ton't plame you--I ton't rebroach you. You
haf nefer thought of it; boat I have thought, and I should be Guilty,
I must share that man's Guilt, if I gept hiss mawney. If you hat toldt
me at the peginning--if you hat peen frank with meboat it iss all righdt;
you can go on; you ton't see dese tings as I see them; and you haf cot a
family, and I am a free man. I voark to myself, and when I ton't voark,
I sdarfe to myself. But. I geep my handts glean, voark or sdarfe. Gif
him hiss mawney pack! I am sawry for him; I would not hoart hiss
feelings, boat I could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss like
boison!"
March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him the folly, the injustice,
the absurdity of his course; it ended in their both getting angry, and in
Lindau's going away in a whirl of German that included Basil in the guilt
of the man whom Lindau called his master.
"Well," said Mrs. March. "He is a crank, and I think you're well rid of
him. Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can
keep right on."
"Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me feel so sneaking. What a
long day it's been! It seems like a century since I got up."
"Yes, a thousand years. Is there anything else left to happen?"
"I hope not. I'd like to go to bed."
"Why, aren't you going to the theatre?" wailed Bella, coming in upon her
father's desperate expression.
"The theatre? Oh yes, certainly! I meant after we got home," and March
amused himself at the puzzled countenance of the child. "Come on!
Is Tom ready?"
IX.
Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not
feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at
Mrs. Leighton's table. He went to Maroni's for his dinner, for this
reason and for others more obscure. He could not expect to do anything
more with Dryfoos at once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he had
already made an extreme concession to March, and he believed that if he
was to get anything more from him it must be after Dryfoos had dined.
But he was not without the hope, vague and indefinite as it might be,
that he should find Lindau at Maroni's, and perhaps should get some
concession from him, some word of regret or apology which he could report
to Dryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening the affair with him;
perhaps Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would back down
altogether, and for March's sake would withdraw from all connection with
'Every Other Week' himself, and so leave everything serene. Fulkerson
felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such a course
to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it: he did not care for Lindau a
great deal, and he did care a great deal for the magazine.
But he did not find Lindau at Maroni's; he only found Beaton. He sat
looking at the doorway as Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came
and took a place at his table. Something in Beaton's large-eyed
solemnity of aspect invited Fulkerson to confidence, and he said, as he
pulled his napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty,
often-washed linen at Maroni's was apt to be), across his knees, "I was
looking for you this morning, to talk with you about the Christmas
number, and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn't find you; but
I guess I might as well have spared myself my emotions."
"Why?" asked Beaton, briefly.
"Well, I don't know as there's going to be any Christmas number."
"Why?" Beaton asked again.
"Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief
translator and polyglot smeller."
"Lindau?"
"Lindau is his name."
"What does the literary editor expect after Lindau's expression of his
views last night?"
"I don't know what he expected, but the ground he took with the old man
was that, as Lindau's opinions didn't characterize his work on the
magazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishing him for them
the old man wanted him turned off, as he calls it."
"Seems to be pretty good ground," said Beaton, impartially, while he
speculated, with a dull trouble at heart, on the effect the row would
have on his own fortunes. His late visit home had made him feel that the
claim of his family upon him for some repayment of help given could not
be much longer delayed; with his mother sick and his father growing old,
he must begin to do something for them, but up to this time he had spent
his salary even faster than he had earned it. When Fulkerson came in he
was wondering whether he could get him to increase it, if he threatened
to give up his work, and he wished that he was enough in love with
Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end in
the sorrowful conviction that he was really in love with Alma Leighton,
who had no money, and who had apparently no wish to be married for love,
even. "And what are you going to do about it?" he asked, listlessly.
"Be dogged if I know what I'm going to do about it," said Fulkerson.
"I've been round all day, trying to pick up the pieces--row began right
after breakfast this morning--and one time I thought I'd got the thing
all put together again. I got the old man to say that he had spoken to
March a little too authoritatively about Lindau; that, in fact, he ought
to have communicated his wishes through me; and that he was willing to
have me get rid of Lindau, and March needn't have anything to do with it.
I thought that was pretty white, but March says the apologies and regrets
are all well enough in their way, but they leave the main question where
they found it."
"What is the main question?" Beaton asked, pouring himself out some
Chianti. As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he
would drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three
dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it.
"The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing
Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my
bouncing the old fellow it's the same as if he bounced him."
"It might have that complexion in some lights," said Beaton. He drank
off his Chianti, and thought he would have it twice a week, or make
Maroni keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father two
dollars. "And what are you going to do now?"
"That's what I don't know," said Fulkerson, ruefully. After a moment he
said, desperately, "Beaton, you've got a pretty good head; why don't you
suggest something?"
"Why don't you let March go?" Beaton suggested.
"Ah, I couldn't," said Fulkerson. "I got him to break up in Boston and
come here; I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thing like
he has; he's--a friend." Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach
he could make to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.
Beaton shrugged. "Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate
you. They're too expensive for me. Then, suppose you get rid of
Dryfoos?"
Fulkerson laughed forlornly. "Go on, Bildad. Like to sprinkle a few
ashes over my boils? Don't mind me!"
They both sat silent a little while, and then Beaton said, "I suppose you
haven't seen Dryfoos the second time?"
"No. I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I
tackled him. But something seems to be the matter with Maroni's cook.
I don't want anything to eat."
"The cooking's about as bad as usual," said Beaton. After a moment he
added, ironically, for he found Fulkerson's misery a kind of relief from
his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it was amusing, "Why
not try an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary?"
"What do you mean?"
"Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you!"
"Which other old fool? The old fools seem to be as thick as flies."
"That Southern one."
"Colonel Woodburn?"
"Mmmmm."
"He did seem to rather take to the colonel!" Fulkerson mused aloud.
"Of course he did. Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal
slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos's muddy imagination. He'd
listen to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn told him to do."
Beaton smiled cynically.
Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat. "You've struck it,
old man." The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkerson
slipped a dollar in his hand. "Never mind the coat; you can give the
rest of my dinner to the poor, Paolo. Beaton, shake! You've saved my
life, little boy, though I don't think you meant it." He took Beaton's
hand and solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out of the door.
They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton's when he arrived and sat
down with them and began to put some of the life of his new hope into
them. His appetite revived, and, after protesting that he would not take
anything but coffee, he went back and ate some of the earlier courses.
But with the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he did not
conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that he was eager to get her apart
from the rest for some reason. When he accomplished this, it seemed as
if he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he had not wholly
contrived it.
"I'm so glad to get a chance to speak to you alone," he said at once; and
while she waited for the next word he made a pause, and then said,
desperately, "I want you to help me; and if you can't help me, there's no
help for me."
"Mah goodness," she said, "is the case so bad as that? What in the woald
is the trouble?"
"Yes, it's a bad case," said Fulkerson. "I want your father to help me."
"Oh, I thoat you said me!"
"Yes; I want you to help me with your father. I suppose I ought to go to
him at once, but I'm a little afraid of him."
"And you awe not afraid of me? I don't think that's very flattering, Mr.
Fulkerson. You ought to think Ah'm twahce as awful as papa."
"Oh, I do! You see, I'm quite paralyzed before you, and so I don't feel
anything."
"Well, it's a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis. But--go on."
"I will--I will. If I can only begin."
"Pohaps Ah maght begin fo' you."
"No, you can't. Lord knows, I'd like to let you. Well, it's like this."
Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation,
he abruptly laid the whole affair before her. He did not think it
necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given
Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his
excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for
having done so. In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a
fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like
having been confided in, and she said, "Well, Ah don't see what you can
do with you' ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch."
"My ideals of friendship? What do you mean?"
"Oh, don't you suppose we know? Mr. Beaton said you we' a pofect Bahyard
in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it."
"Is that so?" said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice
Lindau in this case. He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous
in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he
wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of
throwing March over.
"But Ah most say," Miss Woodburn went on, "Ah don't envy you you' next
interview with Mr. Dryfoos. Ah suppose you'll have to see him at once
aboat it."
The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences.
"Ah, there's where your help comes in. I've exhausted all the influence
I have with Dryfoos--"
"Good gracious, you don't expect Ah could have any!"
They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the
preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, "If I judged from myself,
I should expect you to bring him round instantly."
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, with mock meekness.
"Not at all. But it isn't Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it's your
father. I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I-I'm afraid
to ask him."
"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!" she said, and she insinuated something through her
burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies. He swore in his heart
that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and
so good. "Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast's clea'." She
went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the
little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening
paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and
Alma had gone to her room. She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand
outstretched behind her, and said, "Go and ask him."
"Alone!" he palpitated.
"Oh, what a cyowahd!" she cried, and went with him. "Ah suppose you'll
want me to tell him aboat it."
"Well, I wish you'd begin, Miss Woodburn," he said. "The fact is, you
know, I've been over it so much I'm kind of sick of the thing."
Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father's shoulder. "Look
heah, papa! Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to
do it fo' him."
The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity
elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from
falling off. His daughter continued: "He's got into an awful difficulty
with his edito' and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them."
"I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel,
"but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability."
"You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said?" cried the girl. "Then
Ah don't see but what you'll have to explain it you'self, Mr. Fulkerson."
"Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel," said
Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, "that I can
only throw in a little side-light here and there."
The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic
satisfaction. He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr.
Fulkerson's appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high
joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he
had arranged for meetings between gentlemen. Next to bearing a
challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful.
But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the
case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.
"I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to the serious nature of
the facts, "that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his
questions at the dinner-table last night."
"Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to
withdraw his words at the colonel's look of displeasure.
"I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau," Colonel Woodburn
continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; "I do not
agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological
points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the
expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far
as they had no personal bearing."
"Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of
her father's chair.
"At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal
censure in Mr. Lindau's questions concerning his suppression of the
strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it."
"Exactly," Fulkerson assented.
"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like
Mr. March--I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the
matter--could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe."
"Yes, I see," said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the
human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father's, that
Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.
"Mr. Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right from his point of view,
and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right. The position of Mr. March is
perfectly correct--"
His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm. "Mah goodness!
If nobody's in the wrong, ho' awe you evah going to get the mattah
straight?"
"Yes, you see," Fulkerson added, "nobody can give in."
"Pardon me," said the colonel, "the case is one in which all can give
in."
"I don't know which 'll begin," said Fulkerson.
The colonel rose. "Mr. Lindau must begin, sir. We must begin by seeing
Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of
his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence
to Mr. Dryfoos. If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this
will be perfectly simple."
Fulkerson shook his head. "But it wouldn't help. Dryfoos don't care a
rap whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not. As far as that is
concerned, he's got a hide like a hippopotamus. But what he hates is
Lindau's opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such
opinions shall have any work from him. And what March says is that no
man shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don't care what
they are."
The colonel stood a moment in silence. "And what do you expect me to do
under the circumstances?"
"I came to you for advice--I thought you might suggest----?"
"Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?"
"Well, that's about the size of it," Fulkerson admitted. "You see,
colonel," he hastened on, "I know that you have a great deal of influence
with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he's ever read in
'Every Other Week,' and he's proud of your acquaintance. Well, you know"
--and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in
Beaton's phrase and had been on his tongue ever since--" you're the man
on horseback to him; and he'd be more apt to do what you say than if
anybody else said it."
"You are very good, sir," said the colonel, trying to be proof against
the flattery, "but I am afraid you overrate my influence." Fulkerson let
him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by
holding her fan against her lips. Whatever the process was in the
colonel's mind, he said at last: "I see no good reason for declining to
act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of
service to you. But"--he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with
precipitate thanks--"I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course
will be in the event of failure?"
"Failure?" Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.
"Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not
wholly agreeable to my feelings."
"Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I--"
"There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain
aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character in which he is not a gentleman.
We have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I
may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night."
"No," Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had
behaved very well.
"What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this
matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in
state quo."
"I see," said Fulkerson.
"And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party
your own feelings are with in the difference."
The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers
fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time,
"As between Lindau and Dryfoos?" though he knew this was not the point.
"As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March," said the colonel.
Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. "There
can't be any choice for me in such a case. I'm for March, every time."
The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, "If there had been
any choice fo' you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a
step with you."
"Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with a, literal application
of the idea, "was it your intention that we should both go?"
"Well, I don't know; I suppose it was."
"I think it will be better for me to go alone," said the colonel; and,
with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: "In these
matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity.
I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act
more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone."
Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable
views. He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the
colonel's sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was
through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March's side,
or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his
mission.
"I'm not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it," he said.
"There is no question of courage," said the colonel. "It is a question
of dignity--of personal dignity."
"Well, don't let that delay you, papa," said his daughter, following him
to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on
with his overcoat. "Ah shall be jost wald to know ho' it's toned oat."
"Won't you let me go up to the house with you?" Fulkerson began.
"I needn't go in--"
"I prefer to go alone," said the colonel. "I wish to turn the points
over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company."
He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing-
room, where she said the Leightons were. They, were not there, but she
did not seem disappointed.
"Well, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "you have got an ahdeal of friendship,
sure enough."
"Me?" said Fulkerson. "Oh, my Lord! Don't you see I couldn't do
anything else? And I'm scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel
don't bring the old man round, I reckon it's all up with me. But he'll
fetch him. And I'm just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss
Woodburn."
She waved his thanks aside with her fan. "What do you mean by its being
all up with you?"
"Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we've
both got to go overboard together. Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can
stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as
we're concerned."
"And then what?" the girl pursued.
"And then, nothing--till we pick ourselves up."
"Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?"
"He may."
"And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a principle?"
"I reckon."
"And you do it jost fo' an ahdeal?"
"It won't do to own it. I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere."
"Well, men awe splendid," sighed the girl. "Ah will say it."
"Oh, they're not so much better than women," said Fulkerson, with a
nervous jocosity. "I guess March would have backed down if it hadn't
been for his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see
that she would have sacrificed all her husband's relations sooner than
let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken. It's pretty easy
for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him.
But when you come to play it alone--"
"Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl, solemnly, "Ah will stand bah you in this,
if all the woald tones against you." The tears came into her eyes, and
she put out her hand to him.
"You will?" he shouted, in a rapture. "In every way--and always--as
long as you live? Do you mean it?" He had caught her hand to his breast
and was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.
The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her
face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness. "You don't believe," she said,
hoarsely, "that Ah meant that?"
"No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don't, nothing else means
anything."
There was no space, there was only a point of wavering. "Ah do mean it."
When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.
"No' you most go," she said.
"But the colonel--our fate?"
"The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah'm not afraid of ouah fate, no' that
we've taken it into ouah own hands." She looked at him with dewy eyes of
trust, of inspiration.
"Oh, it's going to come out all right," he said. "It can't come out
wrong now, no matter what happens. But who'd have thought it, when I
came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour
ago--"
"Three houahs and a half ago!" she said. "No! you most jost go. Ah'm
tahed to death. Good-night. You can come in the mawning to see-papa."
She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he
ran laughing down the steps into her father's arms.
"Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you." He had really thought
he would walk off his exultation in that direction.
"I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the colonel began, gravely,
"that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position."
"Oh, all right," said Fulkerson, with unabated joy. "It's what I
expected. Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess
the world won't come to an end if he bounces us both. But I'm
everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don't know what to
say to you. I--I won't detain you now; it's so late. I'll see you in
the morning. Good-ni--"
Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part. The colonel laid
hold of his arm and turned away with him. "I will walk toward your place
with you. I can understand why you should be anxious to know the
particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos"; and in the statement which
followed he did not spare him the smallest. It outlasted their walk and
detained them long on the steps of the 'Every Other Week' building. But
at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if
he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.
By the tune he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a
very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven. He took March's hand
with high courage, and said, "Well, the old man sticks to his point,
March." He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: "And
I stick by you. I've thought it all over, and I'd rather be right with
you than wrong with him."
"Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson," said March. "But perhaps--
perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion. Lindau seems
to have got in with his, for the present."
He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood a moment looking at
each other rather queerly. Fulkerson was the first to recover his
spirits. "Well," he said, cheerily, "that let's us out."
"Does it? I'm not sure it lets me out," said March; but he said this in
tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any
action in the matter.
"Why, what are you going to do?" Fulkerson asked. "If Lindau won't work
for Dryfoos, you can't make him."
March sighed. "What are you going to do with this money?" He glanced at
the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.
Fulkerson scratched his head. "Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it
to the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find 'em?"
"I suppose we've no right to use it in any way. You must give it to
Dryfoos."
"To the deserving rich? Well, you can always find them. I reckon you
don't want to appear in the transaction! I don't, either; but I guess I
must." Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad.
He directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and
he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where
it came from.
Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair
left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with
all a lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happy as he
when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took
her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst.
They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the
best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had
been especially looked to in the disposition of events. They were in a
glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each
other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them
both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own;
he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the
still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.
Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps
failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so
unexpectedly brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed to his
ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he
hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some
abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny
that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why.
The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?
"Perhaps none," the colonel admitted. But he added, "I should like the
opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos
and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of
honor--a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known."
"Well, Ah've no doabt," said his daughter, demurely, "that you'll have
the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you. But at the same
tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo' the present."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Anticipative reprisal
Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
Courtship
Got their laugh out of too many things in life
Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
Ignorant of her ignorance
It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
Life has taught him to truckle and trick
Man's willingness to abide in the present
No longer the gross appetite for novelty
No right to burden our friends with our decisions
Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
By William Dean Howells
PART FIFTH
I.
Superficially, the affairs of 'Every Other Week' settled into their
wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated.
But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed
with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau. He did not sympathize
with Lindau's opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as
wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's. But while he thought this,
and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at
Dryfoos's dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March's
protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with
Lindau. He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the
magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking.
But he said that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his
preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the
prosperity of the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own
humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should
return Dryfoos's money as if it had been the spoil of a robber. His wife
agreed with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to
have that tiresome old German coming about. They had to account for his
absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell
that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even
though Lindau was wrong and their father was right. This heightened Mrs.
March's resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had
placed her husband in a false position. If anything, she resented
Dryfoos's conduct more than Lindau's. He had never spoken to March about
the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the
apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson. So far as March knew,
Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some
reason that did not personally affect him. They never spoke of him, and
March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man
knew that Lindau had returned his money. He avoided talking to Conrad,
from a feeling that if be did he should involuntarily lead him on to
speak of his differences with his father. Between himself and Fulkerson,
even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness.
Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional
reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson's character in one
direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he
could have wished.
He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not.
It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with
Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more
transient, if it existed at all. He advanced into the winter as
radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any
pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially
when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you
had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.
Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter's engagement,
when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard
to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries. He
had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote
contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that
he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But because he had
nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection
of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he
knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking
that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him;
and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to
his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a
son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if
it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him. She was
competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal
interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally
dear to him, and practically absurd to her. No such South as he
remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as
he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the
world as she found it, and made the best of it. She trusted in
Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in
small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. She was
not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her
expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked
the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She
did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did
him justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than
justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.
Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and
his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the
confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the
Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March.
But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and
entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only
needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble. She interested
herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged
couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she
prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern
qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England
superiority. She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom
illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison;
and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented,
only made it more ridiculous.
Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of
Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it
out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton
received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton
was engaged, too.
It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten;
in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the
unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed
the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to
tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood
in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,
but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the
winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the
Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach.
He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the
Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma
complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch
him.
"Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her
laugh.
"If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not."
"No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied
negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence
of mind."
"And you think I'm always studied, always affected?"
"I didn't say so."
"I didn't ask you what you said."
"And I won't tell you what I think."
"Ah, I know what you think."
"What made you ask, then?" The girl laughed again with the satisfaction
of her sex in cornering a man.
Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose
she suggested, frowning.
"Ah, that's it. But a little more animation--
"'As when a great thought strikes along the brain,
And flushes all the cheek.'"
She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again.
"You ought to be photographed. You look as if you were sitting for it."
Beaton said: "That's because I know I am being photographed, in one way.
I don't think you ought to call me affected. I never am so with you; I
know it wouldn't be of any use."
"Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter."
"No, I never flatter you."
"I meant you flattered yourself."
"How?"
"Oh, I don't know. Imagine."
"I know what you mean. You think I can't be sincere with anybody."
"Oh no, I don't."
"What do you think?"
"That you can't--try." Alma gave another victorious laugh.
Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest
in Alma's sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which
they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives.
Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy
after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper
in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs,
in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.
"They seem to be having a pretty good time in there," said Fulkerson,
detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.
"At least Alma does," said Miss Woodburn.
"Do you think she cares for him?"
"Quahte as moch as he desoves."
"What makes you all down on Beaton around here? He's not such a bad
fellow."
"We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton isn't doan on him."
"Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't be much question
about it."
They both laughed, and Alma said, "They seem to be greatly amused with
something in there."
"Me, probably," said Beaton. "I seem to amuse everybody to-night."
"Don't you always?"
"I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma."
She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her
name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. "You didn't at
first. I really used to believe you could be serious, once."
"Couldn't you believe it again? Now?"
"Not when you put on that wind-harp stop."
"Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best
friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them."
"He's made some very pretty ones about you."
"Like the one you just quoted?"
"No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says" She stopped,
teasingly.
"What?"
"He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to
be everything."
"That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That's what you say, Alma.
Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it."
"We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be
clever.'" He could not help laughing. She went on: "I always thought
that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a
human girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time. I should
like to have it applied to the other 'sect' a while. As if any girl that
was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever."
"Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?" Beaton asked.
"Not if you were a girl."
"You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were one-
tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I
have now. I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think I am."
"Who said I thought you were false?"
"No one," said Beaton. "It isn't necessary, when you look it--live it."
"Oh, dear! I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject."
"I know I'm despicable. I could tell you something--the history of this
day, even--that would make you despise me." Beaton had in mind his
purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with
the money he ought to have sent his father. "But," he went on, darkly,
with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness
must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the
guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the depths of
baseness I could descend to."
"I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, "if you'd give me
some hint."
Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was
afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very
wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should
not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office
as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is
magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the
right distance on her sketch. "Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the
sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to
interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your
Judas?"
"I haven't done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of it
at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don't suppose it
could be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to
subscribers for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that."
Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, "'Every
Other Week' seems to be going on just the same as ever."
"Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe. Fulkerson," said
Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, "has managed the whole
business very well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice."
"Very likely," Alma suggested, vaguely. "Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn't,
he couldn't!" She laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of
embarrassment.
He tried to recover his dignity in saying, "He's 'a very good fellow, and
he deserves his happiness."
"Oh, indeed!" said Alma, perversely. "Does any one deserve happiness?"
"I know I don't," sighed Beaton.
"You mean you don't get it."
"I certainly don't get it."
"Ah, but that isn't the reason."
"What is?"
"That's the secret of the universe," She bit in her lower lip, and looked
at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.
"Are you never serious?" he asked.
"With serious people always."
"I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness--" He threw
himself impulsively forward in his chair.
"Oh, pose, pose!" she cried.
"I won't pose," he answered, "and you have got to listen to me. You
know I'm in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me. Can't
that time--won't it--come back again? Try to think so, Alma!"
"No," she said, briefly and seriously enough.
"But that seems impossible. What is it I've done what have you against
me?"
"Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn't recall it if I wished. Why
did you bring it up? You've broken your word. You know I wouldn't have
let you keep coming here if you hadn't promised never to refer to it."
"How could I help it? With that happiness near us--Fulkerson--"
"Oh, it's that? I might have known it!"
"No, it isn't that--it's something far deeper. But if it's nothing you
have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now
as you did then? I haven't changed."
"But I have. I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as
well understand it once for all. Don't think it's anything in yourself,
or that I think you unworthy of me. I'm not so self-satisfied as that;
I know very well that I'm not a perfect character, and that I've no claim
on perfection in anybody else. I think women who want that are fools;
they won't get it, and they don't deserve it. But I've learned a good.
deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of
art, and of art alone that's what I've made up my mind to."
"A woman that's made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!"
"Would a man have that had done so?"
"But I don't believe you, Alma. You're merely laughing at me. And,
besides, with me you needn't give up art. We could work together. You
know how much I admire your talent. I believe I could help it--serve it;
I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!"
"I don't want any slave--nor any slavery. I want to be free always. Now
do you see? I don't care for you, and I never could in the old way; but
I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to
give up my work. Shall we go on?" She looked at her sketch.
"No, we shall not go on," he said, gloomily, as he rose.
"I suppose you blame me," she said, rising too.
"Oh no! I blame no one--or only myself. I threw my chance away."
"I'm glad you see that; and I'm glad you did it. You don't believe me,
of course. Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women?
And if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women? I'm sure
that if work doesn't fail me, health won't, and happiness won't."
"But you could work on with me--"
"Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn't be woman enough to wish my
work always less and lower than yours? At least I've heart enough for
that!"
"You've heart enough for anything, Alma. I was a fool to say you
hadn't."
"I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least,
of having heart--"
"Ah, there's where you're wrong!"
"But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow. And now I don't want you ever
to speak to me about this again."
"Oh, there's no danger!" he cried, bitterly. "I shall never willingly
see you again."
"That's as you like, Mr. Beaton. We've had to be very frank, but I don't
see why we shouldn't be friends. Still, we needn't, if you don't like."
"And I may come--I may come here--as--as usual?"
"Why, if you can consistently," she said, with a smile, and she held out
her hand to him.
He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been
put upon him. At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the
aspect of his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were not very
familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on
Japanese bric-a-brac. When he saw these things in the shops he had felt
that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was
partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to
pay his father. As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something
weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life.
He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his
pipe. Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a
remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come
to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit
between them. Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she
had taken him seriously. It was inevitable that he should declare
himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of
his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance,
though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy.
He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone
before, and it left him free.
But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.
Leighton asked Alma what had happened. Alma told her.
"And he won't come any more?" her mother sighed, with reserved censure.
"Oh, I think he will. He couldn't very well come the next night. But he
has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything--even
the habit of thinking he's in love with some one."
"Alma," said her mother, "I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let
a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him."
"Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?"
"But it does hurt her, Alma. It--it's indelicate. It isn't fair to him;
it gives him hopes."
"Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton
comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house."
"If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her mother, taking up another
branch of the inquiry, "that you really knew your own mind, I should be
easier about it."
"Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and,
what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.
Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up."
"What expressions!" Mrs. Leighton lamented.
"He let it out himself," Alma went on. "And you wouldn't have thought it
was very flattering yourself. When I'm made love to, after this,
I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another
engaged couple anywhere about."
"Did you tell him that, Alma?"
"Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I'm
not quite so indelicate as that."
"I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn
you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest."
"Oh, so did he!"
"And you didn't?"
"Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he's very much in earnest with
Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he's a
painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor.
He has too many gifts--too many tastes."
"And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos--"
"Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so dreadfully
personal!"
"Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the
matter."
"And you know that I don't want to let you--especially when I haven't got
any real feeling in the matter. But I should think--speaking in the
abstract entirely--that if either of those arts was ever going to be in
earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at
least."
"I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he was doing anything now at
the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every
Other Week.'"
"Oh, he is! he is!"
"And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very kind--
very useful to you, in that matter."
"And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I
didn't know you held me so cheap."
"You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don't want you to
cheapen yourself. I don't want you to trifle with any one. I want you
to be honest with yourself."
"Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I've been perfectly honest
with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don't care for him,
and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it. If he
comes here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of
the family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that
capacity or not. I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the
notion that he's coming on any other basis."
Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to
abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, "You know very
well, Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with."
"Then you leave him entirely to me?"
"I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment."
"He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.
It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you
the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe
that, if there's anything he hates, it's openness and candor."
Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help
laughing a little, too.
II.
The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity
which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they
both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not
find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them
after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe for a
time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them,
and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine's pride. Mela
had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs.
Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would
have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.
But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been
forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she
would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister
imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was
suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the
lost cards. As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she
said, "I move we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, at some
of their meetun's."
"If you do," said Christine, "I'll kill you."
Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if
these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the
pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes she even
wished they were all back on the farm.
"It would be the best thing for both of you," said Mrs. Dryfoos, in
answer to such a burst of desperation. "I don't think New York is any
place for girls."
"Well, what I hate, mother," said Mela, "is, it don't seem to be any
place for young men, either." She found this so good when she had said
it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.
"A body would think there had never been any joke before."
"I don't see as it's a joke," said Mrs. Dryfoos. "It's the plain truth."
"Oh, don't mind her, mother," said Mela. "She's put out because her old
Mr. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks. If you don't watch
out, that fellow 'll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your
pains."
"Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, Mela," Christine clawed
back.
"No; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody." This was what Mela said
for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true. When Kendricks
came with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, she used all her
cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton
stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to
bed. The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him,
as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.
Horn's; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material
which had yet come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the
young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his
stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go. But they made a visit of
decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him
afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get
into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very
little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in
her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the
disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself,
Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average
American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society
all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of
conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was
simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him
that she would come even to better literary effect if this were
recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to
fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After all, he saw
that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw
out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could
not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not like Beaton's laughing
at the other girl, either. It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of
honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to
find there were so few others like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for
the other girl--and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--
he had better keep away from her, and not give her the impression he was
in love with her. He rather fancied that this was the part of a
gentleman, and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral
complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and
was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the
wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the
straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.
To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even
though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of
twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.
Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet
twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent
itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of
the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and
less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none
at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was
thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right
direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it
seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was
sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man
could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton
decided to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper than even fate
would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done
with it, however terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape from
himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try.
After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton,
and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while
that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her
destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own. But as it
was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course.
It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that
he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather
oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except
on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the
duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her
list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many
words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the
girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted
to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems
that young people usually debate so personally. Son of the working-
people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters;
he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them.
Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the
Dryfooses. She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her
to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of
avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to renew the effort she
had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow-
creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to
befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile
sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way
for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon,
but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much
or how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which she
made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal
interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the
talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued
to meet in their common work among the poor.
"He seems very different," she ventured.
"Oh, quite," said Beaton. "He's the kind of person that you might
suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a
cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for. But he's
awfully dull company, don't you think? I never can get anything out of
him."
"He's very much in earnest."
"Remorselessly. We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the
office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of
the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put
his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish
motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political
interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible."
"I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, "Well, the man of one
idea is always a little ridiculous."
"When his idea is right?" she demanded. "A right idea can't be
ridiculous."
"Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He's flat; he has no relief,
no projection."
She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to
his own, disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a
little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of
tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: "I must go.
Good-bye!" and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of
having suddenly thought of something imperative.
He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this
strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him,
and confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not
having palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have
been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments
Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could
somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.
She had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds
of self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls had
entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young
and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be
influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her
separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their
stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her
aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course,
had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a
decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as
she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself
into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after
her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her
course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-
reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play,
from opera to opera. She tasted, after she had practically renounced
them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the
hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to
own to herself that she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the
girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did
not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn
felt that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret could have borne
either alone, but together they were wearing her out. She felt it a duty
to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not
forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.
She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings
for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working-
women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once
occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught
at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving
Margaret's former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his
classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be
induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very
well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was
interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she
murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them,
without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew
Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.
She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art? Beaton said,
Oh yes, he believed so.
But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that
direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class;
she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than
from any one else's.
He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half
as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much.
Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore's terrible sincerity
discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the
outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some
illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of
Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest
thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a
little less severe. Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who
were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was
dismissed.
He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed
to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said
of Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class
himself. Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would
let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had? The more
Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was
convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not
consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general
effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at
home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having just
determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's Thursdays again, he decided to go
once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat
callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point
from which he should launch it.
In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only
unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in
some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome,
drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of
artificiality should intimate, however innocently--the innocence made it
all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be
so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere
before his self-respect could be restored. It was only five o'clock, and
he went on up-town to the Dryfooses', though he had been there only the
night before last. He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received
him.
"The young ladies are down-town shopping," she said, "but I am very glad
of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived
several years in Europe."
"Yes," said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her
pleasure in seeing him alone. "I believe so?" He involuntarily gave his
words the questioning inflection.
"You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't find what I am going to ask
so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?" Mrs.
Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.
Beaton frowned. "Why do I come so much?"
"Yes."
"Why do I--Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you
ask?"
"Oh, certainly. There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to
be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this
house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to
them. I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and you
understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be
speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do
not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are
either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you
are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued
to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy
gleam.
Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He
had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and
sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his
senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened, and
then turned an angry pallor. "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you ask
this from the young ladies?"
"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
her authority in the form of a sneer. "As I have suggested, they would
hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no
objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.
Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything
about your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very
pleasant." The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as
something rather nice.
"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. "If I told
you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"
"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
leading them on to infer differently." They both mechanically kept up
the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt
in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant.
A good many thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were
flattering. He had not been unconscious that the part he had played
toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy
which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was
aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way
that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because
he was listless and wished nothing. He rose in saying: "I might be a
little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't trouble you
with any palliating theory. I will not come any more."
He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I
am concerned with."
She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it
had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs.
Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away
hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he
particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop
going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.
Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming. He only thought
how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left
trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the
conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.
"By heavens! this is piling it up," he said to himself through his set
teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult
from Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other
Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some
pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate
any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he
should find him at that hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that
it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find
him a little later at Mrs. Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became
an added injury.
The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time. There never
had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he
had and what he expected to have so recklessly. He was in debt to
Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary. The
thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which
he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort of
face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his
employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had
renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception of
a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs.
Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult him--presented
itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He thought with
loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art. How easy the
thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool's girl
that he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why should not he do
that? No one else cared for him; and at a year's end, probably, one
woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and
probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos
than if she were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out of the
question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be
forever unlike every other woman to him.
The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far down-
town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was he
found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth Street,
very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not
possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the
Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a
surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while he
roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming. He
found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by its
thong from his wrist.
"When do you suppose a car will be along?" he asked, rather in a general
sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
policeman could tell him.
The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter.
"In about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
"What's the matter?" asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.
"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed
to overcome his contempt of it. "Knocked off everywhere this morning
except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines." He spat again and
kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men
on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best
clothes.
"Some of the strikers?" asked Beaton.
The policeman nodded.
"Any trouble yet?"
"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars," said the
policeman.
Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would
now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated
station. "If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," he said,
ferociously, "and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you'd save a
great deal of bother."
"I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much," said the policeman, still
swinging his locust. "Anyway, we shant begin it. If it comes to a
fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of
his helmet, "we can drive the whole six thousand of 'em into the East
River without pullin' a trigger."
"Are there six thousand in it?"
"About."
"What do the infernal fools expect to live on?"
"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with a grin
of satisfaction in his irony. "It's got to run its course. Then they'll
come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs,
and plead to be taken on again."
"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of how much he
was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as
one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs.
Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would see them starve before I'd take them back
--every one of them."
"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the
companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many
drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, "I guess that's
what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many
for them, and there ain't enough other men to take their places."
"No matter," said Beaton, severely. "They can bring in men from other
places."
"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were
standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have
some fun with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down
toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On
the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering
up from the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of
its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was rather
impressive.
III.
The strike made a good deal of talk in it he office of 'Every Other Week'
that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself
that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who
lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were. He
enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to
buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost
every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only the
latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it,
which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable
measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed the
interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he
equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road
managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine
feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of
direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely
refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the
men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began
to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in their
own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase "iron hand"
did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At
the same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble
was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their
approval. In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State
Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many
scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and
the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now
we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in
modern times. But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the
strikers to submit their grievance. The road; were as one road in
declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely
asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way.
One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board,
who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.
Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting
on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared
itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its
business if it had had any. Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps
because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.
"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to
fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a
private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated--
as any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out at our pains
and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.
It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
inhabitants."
"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of
the case.
"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold
on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their
own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no
services in return for their privileges."
"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. "Well,
it's nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town
he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."
"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
asked March.
"I don't know. It savors of horse sense."
"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged
man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed. And before
you're married, too."
"Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the
power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed
in. He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and
early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights;
he sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat
shied or a club swung yet. Have you?"
"No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the
papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I'm
solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under
penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is
that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since
the strike began. There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used.
She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this
office."
Fulkerson laughed and said: "Well, it's probably the only thing that's
saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?"
"No. You don't mean to say he's killed!"
"Not if he knows it. But I don't know--What do you say, March? What's
the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?"
"I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow."
"No, but seriously. There 'll be plenty of news paper accounts. But you
could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened
several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style. Heigh? What
made me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two
could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It's a big
thing, March, this strike is. I tell you it's imposing to have a private
war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New
York not minding, it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your
descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest
card! Come! What do you say?"
"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and
she and the children are not killed with me?"
"Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks
to do the literary part?"
"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see the form of
literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for."
"Say!" March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another
inspiration, and smiled patiently. "Look here! What's the reason we
couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?"
"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March suggested.
"No; I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows-especially the
foreigners--are educated men. I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used
to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of
Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it."
"I guess not," said March, dryly.
"Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose you put it up
on him the next time you see him."
"I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He added, "I guess he's
renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money."
"Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since?"
"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. I don't feel
particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment of
Fulkerson's grin. "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the
children."
Fulkerson laughed out. "Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who'd 'a'
thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his? But I
suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a
world."
"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially assented.
"One's enough for me."
"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson. "Why, it
must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'
embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like
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