A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years’ familiarity; and so was the well-known street in its Saturday evening solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were an omen of what was to be. But he only said musingly: “A fortnightly. You know that didn’t work in England. The Fortnightly is published once a month now.”

  “It works in France,” Fulkerson retorted. “The Revue des Deux Mondes is still published twice a month. I guess we can make it work in America—with illustrations.”

  “Going to have illustrations?”

  “My dear boy! What are you giving me? Do I look like the sort of lunatic who would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations? Come off!”

  “Ah, that complicates it! I don’t know anything about art.” March’s look of discouragement confessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him.

  “I don’t want you to!” Fulkerson retorted. “Don’t you suppose I shall have an art man?”

  “And will they—the artists—work at a reduced rate too, like the writers, with the hopes of a share in the success?”

  “Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I’ll pay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches on my own terms. You’ll see! They’ll pour in!”

  “Look here, Fulkerson,” said March, “you’d better call this fortnightly of yours The Madness of the Half Moon; or Bedlam Broke Loose wouldn’t be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don’t do it!” The kindness which March had always felt, in spite of his wife’s first misgivings and reservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature trembled in his voice. They had both formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the week they were together in Quebec. When he was not working the newspapers there, he went about with them over the familiar ground they were showing their children, and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as very entertaining about it all. The children liked him too; when they got the clue to his intention and found that he was not quite serious in many of the things he said, they thought he was great fun. They were always glad when their father brought him home on the occasion of Fulkerson’s visits to Boston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospitality, welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration for her husband. He had a way of treating March with deference, as an older and abler man, and of qualifying the freedom he used toward everyone with an implication that March tolerated it voluntarily, which she thought very sweet and even refined.

  “Ah, now you’re talking like a man and a brother!” said Fulkerson. “Why, March, old man, do you suppose I’d come on here and try to talk you into this thing if I wasn’t morally, if I wasn’t perfectly, sure of success? There isn’t any if or and about it. I know my ground, every inch; and I don’t stand alone on it,” he added with a significance which did not escape March. “When you’ve made up your mind, I can give you the proof; but I’m not at liberty now to say anything more. I tell you it’s going to be a triumphal march from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for the procession along the whole line. All you’ve got to do is to fall in.” He stretched out his hand to March. “You let me know as soon as you can.”

  March deferred taking his hand till he could ask, “Where are you going?”

  “Parker House. Take the half past ten for New York tonight.”

  “I thought I might walk your way.” March looked at his watch. “But I shouldn’t have time. Good-bye!”

  He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchanged a cordial pressure. Fulkerson started off at a quick, light pace. Half a block away he stopped, turned round, and seeing March still standing where he had left him, he called back joyously, “I’ve got the name!”

  “What?”

  “Every Other Week.”

  “It isn’t bad.”

  “Ta-ta!”

  II

  ALL THE WAY UP to the South End, March prolonged his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daughter, Bella, was lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of the histrionic intention of her sex. He pressed on, with her clinging about him, to the library, and in the glow of his decision against Fulkerson, kissed his wife, where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcript through her first pair of eyeglasses; it was agreed in the family that she looked distinguished in them, or at any rate cultivated. She took them off to give him a glance of question, and their son, Tom, looked up from his book for a moment; he was in his last year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard.

  “I didn’t get away from the office till half past five,” March explained to his wife’s glance, “and then I walked. I suppose dinner’s waiting. I’m sorry, but I won’t do it anymore.”

  At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a voluble pertness, which her brother had often advised her parents to check in her, unless they wanted her to be universally despised.

  “Papa,” she shouted at last, “you’re not listening!”

  As soon as possible his wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked, “What is it, Basil?”

  “What is what?” he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not avail.

  “What is on your mind?”

  “How do you know there’s anything?”

  “Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing.”

  “Don’t I always kiss you when I come in?”

  “Not now. I suppose it isn’t necessary anymore. Cela va sans baiser.”

  “Yes, I guess it’s so; we get along without the symbolism now.” He stopped, but she knew that he had not finished.

  “Is it about your business? Have they done anything more?”

  “No; I’m still in the dark. I don’t know whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they ever did. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

  “Fulkerson?” She brightened at the name, and March smiled too. “Why didn’t you bring him to dinner?”

  “I wanted to talk with you. Then you do like him?”

  “What has that got to do with it, Basil?”

  “Nothing! Nothing! That is, he was boring away about that scheme of his again. He’s got it into definite shape at last.”

  “What shape?”

  March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with the intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good businessmen when they will let it.

  “It sounds perfectly crazy,” she said finally. “But it mayn’t be. The only thing I didn’t like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to chance things. But what have you got to do with it?”

  “What have I got to do with it?” March toyed with the delay the question gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh, “It seems that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on the Quebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspaper-syndicate business, I told him about my early literary ambitions—”

  “You can’t say that I ever discouraged them, Basil,” his wife put in. “I should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them.”

  “Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him. Perhaps I did; I don’t remember. When he told me about his supplying literature to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked, ‘Why not apply the principle of cooperation to a magazine, and run it in the interest of the contributors?’ and that set him to thinking, and he thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and artists a low price outright for
their work, and give them a chance of the profits in the way of a percentage. After all, it isn’t so very different from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book. And Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity, if it didn’t arouse public sympathy. And the long and short of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it.”

  “To edit it?” His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time to realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he was not joking.

  “Yes. He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the Idea—the germ—the microbe.”

  His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded trifling with it. “That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he owes it to you, it was the least he could do.” Having recognized her husband’s claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a sense of the honor itself, and the value of the opportunity. “It’s a very high compliment to you, Basil; a very high compliment. And you could give up this wretched insurance business that you’ve always hated so and that’s making you so unhappy now that you think they’re going to take it from you. Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson’s offer! It’s a perfect interposition, coming just at this time! Why, do it! Mercy!” she suddenly arrested herself. “He wouldn’t expect you to get along on the possible profits?” Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion.

  March smiled reassuringly and waited to give himself the pleasure of the sensation he meant to give her. “If I’ll make striking phrases for it and edit it too, he’ll give me four thousand dollars.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and watched his wife’s face, luminous with the emotions that flashed through her mind—doubt, joy, anxiety.

  “Basil! You don’t mean it! Why, take it! Take it instantly! Oh, what a thing to happen! Oh, what luck! But you deserve it, if you first suggested it. What an escape, what a triumph over all those hateful insurance people! Oh, Basil, I’m afraid he’ll change his mind! You ought to have accepted on the spot. You might have known I would approve, and you could so easily have taken it back if I didn’t. Telegraph him now! Run right out with the dispatch! Or we can send Tom!”

  In these imperatives of Mrs. March’s there was always much of the conditional. She meant that he should do what she said, if it were entirely right; and she never meant to be considered as having urged him.

  “And suppose his enterprise went wrong?” her husband suggested.

  “It won’t go wrong. Hasn’t he made a success of his syndicate?”

  “He says so—yes.”

  “Very well; then it stands to reason that he’ll succeed in this too. He wouldn’t undertake it if he didn’t know it would succeed; he must have capital.”

  “It will take a great deal to get such a thing going; and even if he’s got an angel behind him—”

  She caught at the words: “An angel?”

  “It’s what the theatrical people call a financial backer. He dropped a hint of something of that kind.”

  “Of course he’s got an angel,” said his wife, promptly adopting the word. “And even if he hadn’t, still, Basil, I should be willing to have you risk it. The risk isn’t so great, is it? We shouldn’t be ruined if it failed altogether. With our stocks we have two thousand a year, anyway, and we could pinch through on that till you got into some other business afterward, especially if we’d saved something out of your salary while it lasted. Basil, I want you to try it! I know it will give you a new lease of life to have a congenial occupation.” March laughed, but his wife persisted. “I’m all for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am. If it’s an experiment, you can give it up.”

  “It can give me up too.”

  “Oh, nonsense! I guess there’s not much fear of that. Now I want you to telegraph to Mr. Fulkerson, so that he’ll find the dispatch waiting for him when he gets to New York. I’ll take the whole responsibility, Basil, and I’ll risk all the consequences.”

  III

  MARCH’S FACE HAD SOBERED more and more as she followed one hopeful burst with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smile and said: “There’s a little condition attached. Where did you suppose it was to be published?”

  “Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should it be published?”

  She looked at him for the intention of his question so searchingly that he quite gave up the attempt to be gay about it. “No,” he said gravely; “it’s to be published in New York.”

  She fell back in her chair. “In New York?” She leaned forward over the table toward him, as if to make sure that she heard aright, and said, with all the keen reproach that he could have expected: “In New York, Basil! Oh, how could you have let me go on?”

  He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning, “I oughtn’t to have done it, but I got started wrong. I couldn’t help putting the best foot forward at first—or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn’t know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but of course that puts an end to it.”

  “Oh, of course,” she assented sadly. “We couldn’t go to New York.”

  “No, I know that,” he said; and with this a perverse desire to tempt her to the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold about the affair himself now. “Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat in New York for about what the interest and taxes come to here, and provisions are cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my time of life. If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured to New York, but I don’t believe I could stand it now.”

  “How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil! You are young enough to try anything—anywhere; but you know I don’t like New York. I don’t approve of it. It’s so big, and so hideous! Of course I shouldn’t mind that; but I’ve always lived in Boston, and the children were born and have all their friendships and associations here.” She added, with the helplessness that discredited her good sense and did her injustice, “I have just got them both into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti’s, and you know how difficult that is.”

  March could not fail to take advantage of an occasion like this. “Well, that alone ought to settle it. Under the circumstances it would be flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of a brilliant opening like that offered me on The Microbe, and the halcyon future which Fulkerson promises if we’ll come to New York, is as dust in the balance against the advantages of the Friday afternoon class.”

  “Basil,” she appealed solemnly, “have I ever interfered with your career?”

  “I never had any for you to interfere with, my dear.” “Basil! Haven’t I always had faith in you? And don’t you suppose that if I thought it would really be for your advancement, I would go to New York or anywhere with you?”

  “No, my dear, I don’t,” he teased. “If it would be for my salvation, yes, perhaps; but not short of that; and I should have to prove by a cloud of witnesses that it would. I don’t blame you. I wasn’t born in Boston, but I understand how you feel. And really, my dear,” he added, without irony, “I never seriously thought of asking you to go to New York. I was dazzled by Fulkerson’s offer, I’ll own that; but his choice of me as editor sapped my confidence in him.”

  “I don’t like to hear you say that, Basil,” she entreated.

  “Well, of course there were mitigating circumstances. I could see that Fulkerson meant to keep the whip hand himself, and that was reassuring. And besides, if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want my services any longer, it wouldn’t be quite like giving up a certainty; though, as a matter of business, I let Fulkerson get that impression; I felt rather sneaking to do it. But if the worst comes to the worst, I can look about for something to do in Boston; and, anyhow, people don’t starve on two thousand a year, though it’s convenient to have five. The fact is I’m too old to change so radically. If you don’t like my saying that, the
n you are, Isabel, and so are the children. I’ve no right to take them from the home we’ve made and to change the whole course of their lives, unless I can assure them of something, and I can’t assure them of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and it’s certainly prettier than New York. I always feel a little proud of hailing from Boston; my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get away from it. But I do appreciate it, my dear. I’ve no more desire to leave it than you have. You may be sure that if you don’t want to take the children out of the Friday afternoon class, I don’t want to leave my library here, and all the ways I’ve got set in. We’ll keep on. Very likely the company won’t supplant me; and if it does and Matkins gets the place, he’ll give me a subordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel! I have put Satan and his angel, Fulkerson, behind me, and it’s all right. Let’s go in to the children.”

  He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat in a growing distraction, and lifted her by the waist from her chair.

  She sighed deeply. “Shall we tell the children about it?”

  “No. What’s the use, now?”

  “There wouldn’t be any,” she assented. When they entered the family room, where the boy and girl sat on either side of the lamp working out the lessons for Monday, which they had left over from the day before, she asked, “Children, how would you like to live in New York?”

  Bella made haste to get in her word first. “And give up the Friday afternoon class?” she wailed.

  Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes: “I shouldn’t want to go to Columbia. They haven’t got any dormitories, and you have to board round anywhere. Are you going to New York?” He now deigned to look up at his father.

  “No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me against it. Your perspective shows the affair in its true proportions. I had an offer to go to New York, but I shall refuse it.”

  IV