A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  March said: “Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then. It must come cheaper, wholesale.”

  “Oh no, it don’t,” said the girl, glad to inform him. “The people that own their boxes and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars apiece for them have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there’s a performance, whether they go or not.”

  “Then I should go every night,” March said.

  “Most of the ladies were low neck—”

  March interposed, “Well, I shouldn’t go low neck.”

  The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling. “Oh, I guess you love to train! Us girls wanted to go low neck too; but Father said we shouldn‘t, and Mother said if we did she wouldn’t come to the front of the box once. Well, she didn’t, anyway. We might just as well’a gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time, and when they had that dance—the ballet, you know—she just shut her eyes. Well, Conrad didn’t like that part much either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it out right in the front of the box. We were about the only ones there that went high neck. Conrad had to wear a swallowtail; but Father hadn’t any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You couldn’t see what he had on in the back o’ the box, anyway.”

  Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more slowly up and down and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned Mrs. March’s smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce eyes over March’s face. “Here comes Mother,” she said, with a sort of breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.

  She paused halfway down, and turning, called up: “Coonrod! Coonrod! You bring my shawl down with you.”

  Her daughter Mela called out to her, “Now, Mother, Christine’ ll give it to you for not sending Mike.”

  “Well, I don’t know where he is, Mely, child,” the mother answered back. “He ain’t never around when he’s wanted; and when he ain’t, it seems like a body couldn’t git shet of him, nohow.”

  “Well, you ought to ring for him,” cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.

  Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed in the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the hope that she was well.

  “I’m just middlin‘,” Mrs. Dryfoos replied. “I ain’t never so well, nowadays. I tell Fawther I don’t believe it agrees with me very well here; but he says I’ll git used to it. He’s away now, out at Moffitt,” she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray hair had a memory of blondness in it like Lindau’s, March noticed. She wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting house in thick western woods expressed itself to him from her presence.

  “Laws, Mother!” said Miss Mela. “What you got that old thing on for? If I’d ‘a known you’d’a come down in that!”

  “Coonrod said it was all right, Mely,” said her mother.

  Miss Mela explained to the Marches: “Mother was raised among the Dunkards, and she thinks it’s wicked to wear anything but a gray silk even for dress up.”

  “You hain’t never heared o’ the Dunkards, I reckon,” the old woman said to Mrs. March. “Some folks calls’em the Beardy Men, because they don’t never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle was one. He raised me.”

  “I guess pretty much everybody’s a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain’t a Dunkard!”

  Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to his wife: “It’s a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe—something like the Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy.”

  “Aren’t they something like the Mennists?” asked Mrs. Mandel.

  “They’re good people,” said the old woman, “and the world’d be a heap better off if there was more like ’em.”

  Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook hands with the visitors. “I am glad you found your way here,” he said to them.

  Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.

  “I’m sorry my father isn’t here,” said the young man to Mrs. March. “He’s never met you yet?”

  “No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

  “Oh, I hope you don’t believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about people,” Mela cried. “He’s the greatest person for carrying on when he gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and Mother get to talking about religion; she says she knows he don’t care anything more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don’t try it on much with Father.”

  “Your Fawther ain’t ever been a perfessor,” her mother interposed; “but he’s always been a good churchgoin’ man.”

  “Not since we come to New York,” retorted the girl.

  “He’s been all broke up since he come to New York,” said the old woman, with an aggrieved look.

  Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. “Have you heard any of our great New York preachers yet, Mrs. March?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.

  “There are a great many things here,” said Conrad, “to take your thoughts off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I think the city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time.”

  “I don’t know that I understand you,” said March. Mela answered for him. “Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go. I’d about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don’t see a bit o’ difference. He’s the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest.” She laughed for enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.

  Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which the talk was always assuming. “Have you been to the fall exhibition?” she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she seemed sunk in.

  “The exhibition?” She looked at Mrs. Mandel.

  “The pictures of the Academy, you know,” Mrs. Mandel explained. “Where I wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on.”

  “No; we haven’t been yet. Is it good?” She had turned to Mrs. March again.

  “I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But there are some good pictures.”

  “I don’t believe I care much about pictures,” said Christine. “I don’t understand them.”

  “Ah, that’s no excuse for not caring about them,” said March lightly. “The painters themselves don’t, half the time.”

  The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing, insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister’s babble. In the light of Fulkerson’s history of the family, its origin, and its ambition, he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister’s folly and an ignorant will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud—too proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife’s social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the inexperienced girl’s doubt whether to treat them with much or little respect. He lost himself in fan
cies about her and her ideals, necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him in her hoarse voice:

  “I think it’s a shame, some of the pictur’s a body sees in the winders. They say there’s a law ag‘inst them things; and if there is, I don’t understand why the police don’t take up them that paints ’em. I hear tell, since I been here, that there’s women that goes to have pictur’s took from them that way by men painters.” The point seemed aimed at March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman’s severity: “I say they ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They’d be drummed out of town in Moffitt.”

  Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: “I should think they would! And they wouldn’t anybody go low neck to the opera house there, either—not low neck the way they do here, anyway.”

  “And that pack of worthless hussies,” her mother resumed, “that come out on the stage and begun to kick—”

  “Laws, Mother!” the girl shouted. “I thought you said you had your eyes shut!”

  All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theater and of art.

  “Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don’t know what they’re doin’ in all their churches, to let such things go on,” said the old woman. “It’s a sin and a shame, I think. Don’t you, Coonrod?”

  A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.

  “If it’s going to be company, Coonrod,” said his mother, making an effort to rise, “I reckon I better go upstairs.”

  “It’s Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” said Conrad. “He thought he might come”; and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the servingman tentatively appeared some minutes later) and let in Fulkerson’s cheerful voice before his cheerful person.

  “Ah, how d’ye do, Conrad? Brought our friend Mr. Beaton with me,” those within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats, they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms akimbo.

  IX

  “AH! HELLO! HELLO!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches. “Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks? How you wuz?” He shook hands gaily all round and took a chair next the old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce Beaton. But he would not let the shadow of Beaton’s solemnity fall upon the company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos and to match rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries. “I’ve brought Mr. Beaton along tonight, and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn’t got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he’s a kind of an orphan, and we’ve just adopted him down at the office. When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh? How’s that for a little starter? We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies. My goodness! It does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. She’s a beauty, and I guess she’s good too. Well, well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won’t you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything. It’s an intaglio I brought from the other side,” he explained to Mrs. March, “and I guess you’ll like to look at it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn‘t, I sold it to’em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine’s hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs, first.”

  He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painter’s words about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

  “Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her mother’s habitual address, “and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that’s right. You know you’d be roaming all over the pasture if she didn’t.”

  The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society and that two young men had been devoted to them.

  “Oh, I think he’s just as lovely as he can live!” said Mely, as she stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others had left them after the departure of their guests.

  “Who?” asked Christine deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a softened fire. She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.

  “Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuck-up Mr. Beaton of yours!”

  “He is proud,” assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.

  Beaton and Fulkerson went to the elevated station with the Marches; but the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone.

  “One way is enough for me,” he explained. “When I walk up, I don’t walk down. Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. “That fellow puzzles me. I don’t know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same time that I want to flatter up, so much. Affect you that way?” he asked of March.

  “Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”

  “And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”

  “Oh, I want to flatter him up.”

  “No; really? Why—Hold on! I’ve got the change.”

  Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window, and made them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride downtown. “Three!” he said to the ticket seller; and when he had walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, “Why?”

  “Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don’t you?” Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.

  “Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?”

  “Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”

  “I guess you’re partly right,” said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.

  “An ideal ‘busted’?” March suggested.

  “No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson. “But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasn’t conceited all the time.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. March exulted. “Nobody could be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst modesty, when he’d be quite flatteryproof.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. I guess that’s what makes me want to kick him. He’s left compliments on my hands that no decent man would.”

  “Oh! That’s tragical,” said March.

  “Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice, “who is Mrs. Mandel?”

  “Who? What do you think of her?” he rejoined. “I’ll tell you about her when we get
in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain’t it beautiful?”

  They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight.

  “The most beautiful thing in New York—the one always and certainly beautiful thing here,” said March. And his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.” She clung to him and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near, and then pulled him back in a panic.

  “Well, there ain’t really much to tell about her,” Fulkerson resumed, when they were seated in the car. “She’s an invention of mine.”

  “Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.

  “Of course!” exclaimed her husband.

  “Yes—at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, “a perfect lady. She was living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don’t mean to say her husband was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music teacher; she met him in Germany, and they got married there and got through her property before they came over here. Well, she didn’t strike me like a person that could make much headway in literature. Her story was well enough, but it hadn’t much sand in it; kind of—well, academic, you know. I told her so, and she understood and cried a little; but she did the best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses—they were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a house—” Fulkerson broke off altogether and said, “I don’t know as I know just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?”