A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  “Not the half of it,” said March. “But you can; or if you forget a third of it, I can come in with my partial half and more than make it up.”

  She had brought her bonnet and sack downstairs with her, and was transferring them from the hat rack to her person while she talked. The friendly doorboy let them into the street, and the clear October evening air inspirited her so that as she tucked her hand under her husband’s arm and began to pull him along, she said, “If we find something right away—and we’re just as likely to get the right flat soon as late; it’s all a lottery—we’ll go to the theater somewhere.”

  She had a moment’s panic about having left the agents’ permits on the table, and after remembering that she had put them into her little shopping bag, where she kept her money (each note crushed into a round wad), and had left that on the hat rack, where it would certainly be stolen, she found it on her wrist. She did not think that very funny, but after a first impulse to inculpate her husband, she let him laugh, while they stopped under a lamp, and she held the permits half a yard away to read the numbers on them.

  “Where are your glasses, Isabel?”

  “On the mantel in our room, of course.”

  “Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs.”

  “I wouldn’t get off secondhand jokes, Basil,” she said; and “Why, here,” she cried, whirling round to the door before which they had halted; “this is the very number! Well, I do believe it’s a sign!”

  One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitor in many of the smaller apartment houses in New York by the sweetness of their race, let the Marches in, or rather, welcomed them to the possession of the premises by the bow with which he acknowledged their permit. It was a large old mansion cut up into five or six dwellings; but it had kept some traits of its former dignity, which pleased people of their sympathetic tastes. The dark mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design, gave a rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide and paved with marble; the carpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous space.

  “There is no elevator?” Mrs. March asked of the janitor.

  He answered, “No, ma’am; only two flights up,” so winningly that she said, “Oh,” in courteous apology, and whispered to her husband as she followed lightly up, “we’ll take it, Basil, if it’s like the rest.”

  “If it’s like him, you mean.”

  “I don’t wonder they wanted to own them,” she hurriedly philosophized. “If I had such a creature, nothing but death should part us, and I should no more think of giving him his freedom—”

  “No; we couldn’t afford it,” returned her husband.

  The apartment the janitor unlocked for them, and lit up from those chandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas fitter realized most of his conceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness than the dignity of the hall. But the rooms were large, and they grouped themselves in a reminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling that had its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut up into smaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which a proud old family of fallen fortunes practices its economies. The rough pine floors showed a black border of tack heads where carpets had been lifted and put down for generations; the white paint was yellow with age; the apartment had light at the front and at the back, and two or three rooms had glimpses of the day through small windows let into their corners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to Heaven through a glass circle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in perpetual twilight. Yet something pleased in it all, and Mrs. March had gone far to adapt the different rooms to the members of her family, when she suddenly thought (and for her to think was to say), “Why, but there’s no steam heat!”

  “No, ma’am,” the janitor admitted; “but dere’s grates in most o’ de rooms, and dere’s furnace heat in de halls.”

  “That’s true,” she admitted, and having placed her family in the apartments, it was hard to get them out again. “Could we manage?” she referred to her husband.

  “Why, I shouldn’t care for the steam heat, if—What is the rent?” he broke off to ask the janitor.

  “Nine hundred, sir.”

  March concluded to his wife, “If it were furnished.”

  “Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of? We’re looking for a furnished flat,” she explained to the janitor, “and this was so pleasant and homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not.”

  She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled so amiably at her flattering oversight on the way downstairs, that she said, as she pinched her husband’s arm, “Now, if you don’t give him a quarter, I’ll never speak to you again, Basil!”

  “I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond his glamour,” said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside. “If it hadn’t been for my strength of character, you’d have taken an unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a year, when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight hundred.”

  “Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?” she said, with a lenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to feel in her husband’s.

  “The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I’ll tell him the apartment doesn’t suit at the threshold. It’s the only way to manage you, Isabel.”

  “It’s true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of them that didn’t have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be black in heaven—that is, black souled.”

  “That isn’t the usual theory,” said March.

  “Well, perhaps not,” she assented. “Where are we going now? Oh yes, to the Xenophon!”

  She pulled him gaily along again, and after they had walked a block down and half a block over, they stood before the apartment house of that name, which was cut on the gas lamps on either side of the heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titter of an electric bell brought a large fat buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves into which the wall paint was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded cap, like a continental portier. When they said they would like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment he owned his inability to cope with the affair and said he must send for the superintendent; he was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in a minute. The buttons brought him—a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes—almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper in recognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the steam heat and elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried to keep their self-respect under the gaze of the superintendent, which they felt was classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he called a private hall, and in the drawing room and the succession of chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen. Everything had been done by the architect to save space, and everything to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor Green. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning round in each room, and had folding beds in the chambers; but there her subordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you did turn. The place was rather pretty and even imposing at first glance, and it took several joint ballots for March and his wife to make sure that with the kitchen there were only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere from large rings on a brass rod; every shelf and dressing case and mantel was littered with gimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were curtained off, and behind these portieres swarmed more gimcracks. The front of the upright piano had what March called a short-skirted portiere
on it, and the top was covered with vases, with dragon candlesticks, and with Jap fans, which also expanded themselves batwise on the walls between the etchings and the watercolors. The floors were covered with filling, and then rugs, and then skins; the easy chairs all had tidies, Armenian and Turkish and Persian; the lounges and sofas had embroidered cushions hidden under tidies. The radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of clocks. China pugs guarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of either andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail before them inside a high filigree fender; on one side was a coal hod in repoussé brass, and on the other a wrought-iron wood basket. Some red Japanese bird-kites were stuck about in the necks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hung opened beneath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade of yellow silk.

  March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the presence of the agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-a-brac Jamescracks, as if this was their full name.

  The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by means of this joke strengthened him to say boldly to the superintendent that it was altogether too small; then he asked carelessly what the rent was.

  “Two hundred and fifty.”

  The Marches gave a start and looked at each other.

  “Don’t you think we could make it do?” she asked him, and he could see that she had mentally saved five hundred dollars as the difference between the rent of their house and that of this flat. “It has some very pretty features, and we could manage to squeeze in, couldn’t we?”

  “You won’t find another furnished flat like it for no two fifty a month in the whole city,” the superintendent put in.

  They exchanged glances again, and March said carelessly, “It’s too small.”

  “There’s a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydides for fifteen,” the superintendent suggested, clicking his keys together as they sank down in the elevator; “seven rooms and a bath.”

  “Thank you,” said March; “we’re looking for a furnished flat.”

  They felt that the superintendent parted from them with repressed sarcasm.

  “Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallness and not the dearness?”

  “No; but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that’s a great deal.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and so high up. But what prices! Now we must be very circumspect about the next place.”

  It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her apron, who received them there. Mrs. March gave her a succinct but perfect statement of their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, or feigned to do so. She shook her head and said that her son would show them the flat. There was a radiator visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel tacitly compromised on steam heat without an elevator, as the flat was only one flight up. When the son appeared from below with a small kerosene hand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but there was no stopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility. When they got safely away from it and into the street, March said, “Well, have you had enough for tonight, Isabel? Shall we go to the theater now?”

  “Not on any account. I want to see the whole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us.” She laughed, but with a certain bitterness.

  “You’ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel.”

  “Oh no!”

  The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to board and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.

  Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of injury. “Well, I must say I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson’s judgment. Anything more utterly different from what I told him we wanted I couldn’t imagine. If he doesn’t manage any better about his business than he has done about this, it will be a perfect failure.”

  “Well, well, let’s hope he’ll be more circumspect about that,” her husband returned, with ironical propitiation. “But I don’t think it’s Fulkerson’s fault altogether. Perhaps it’s the house agents’. They’re a very illusory generation. There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can’t get what you want, you will take what you can get. You don’t suppose the ‘party’ that took our house in Boston was looking for any such house? He was looking for a totally different kind of house in another part of the town.”

  “I don’t believe that!” his wife broke in.

  “Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous rent you asked for it!”

  “We didn’t get much more than half; and, besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred.”

  “Oh, I’m not blaming you, Isabel. I’m only analyzing the house agent, and exonerating Fulkerson.”

  “Well, I don’t believe he told them just what we wanted; and at any rate, I’m done with agents. Tomorrow I’m going entirely by advertisements.”

  VIII

  MRS. MARCH TOOK THE VERTEBRATE with her to the Vienna Coffeehouse, where they went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from them. She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor, and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs. “Elegant, light, large, single, and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements—bath, icebox, etc.” for $25 and $30 a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth, advertised them for $40 and $60, “with steam heat and elevator,” rent free till November. Others, attractive from their air of conscientious scruple, announced “first-class flats; good order; reasonable rents.” The Helena asked the reader if she had seen the “cabinet finish, hardwood floors, and frescoed ceilings” of its $50 flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments, with “six light rooms and bath, porcelain washtubs, electric bells, and hallboy,” as it offered for $75 were unapproached by competition. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion. Mrs. March got several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remote from the downtown region of her choice as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

  The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at a window giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled the Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with a tide of gaily painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the omnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of former times.

  They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked down the stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no longer characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its little fearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuses on either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that certain processional, barbaric gaiety of
the place is gone.

  “Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert,” said March, voicing their common feeling of the change.

  They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves in time for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They came out reluctant into the dazzle and bustle of the street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which they confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.

  “But no matter how consecrated we feel now,” he said, “we mustn’t forget that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went to the Vienna Café for breakfast—to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the Europe of our youth. It was a purely pagan impulse, Isabel, and we’d better own it.”

  “I don’t know,” she returned. “I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bones too much. I wish we didn’t always recognize the facts as we do. Sometimes I should like to blink them. I should like to think I was devouter than I am, and younger, and prettier.”

  “Better not; you couldn’t keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even in such things.”

  “No; I don’t like it, Basil. I should rather wait till the last day for some of my motives to come to the top. I know they’re always mixed, but do let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes.”

  “Well, well, have it your own way, my dear. But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time.”

  She would not consent. “I know I am a good deal younger than I was. I feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on our wedding journey. Don’t you?”

  “Oh yes. But I know I’m not younger; I’m only prettier.”

  She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for unconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in which there was no arrière-pensée of the east wind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to Washington Square, in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves. The primo tenore statue of Garibaldi had not yet taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, but they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife, and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging houses, shops, beer gardens, and studios.