A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first. They stood about the tops of basement stairs and walked two by two along the dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their sleeves across their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move their superiority. Their numbers gave ethnical character to the street and rendered not them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church, built long before their incursion was dreamt of. It seemed to have come to them there, and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something propitiatory, almost deprecative. It was a fancy, of course; the street was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared, pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones. She lay with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation, but the indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case. She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their games and ran gaily trooping after her; even the young fellow and young girl exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed. March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which daily occur to entertain them in such streets. A small town could rarely offer anything comparable to it, and the country never. He said that if life appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that neighborhood, he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions, its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance somewhere.

  But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place? It could not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere; with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked round on these evidences of misery and remembered his neglect of his friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging in some decenter part of the town, and in fact there was some amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he turned into from Mott.

  A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell knob, from which a yard of rusty crape dangled. But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman said he was at home and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of the house, and when March obeyed the German-English “Komm!” that followed his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meager breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air. On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which seemed also to be a cobbler’s shop; on the right, through a door that stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time, “Hier!”

  XII

  MARCH PUSHED THE DOOR OPEN into a room like that on the left, but with a writing desk, instead of a cobbler’s bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat propped up, with a coat over his shoulders and a skullcap on his head, reading a book from which he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his spectacles at March. His hairy old breast showed through the nightshirt, which gaped apart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the book to keep it open.

  “Ah, my tear yo’ng friendt! Passil! Marge! Iss it you?” he called out joyously the next moment.

  “Why, are you sick, Lindau?” March anxiously scanned his face in taking his hand.

  Lindau laughed. “No; I’m all righdt. Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle eggonomigal. Idt’s jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire a-goin’ all the time. Don’t wandt to gome too hardt on the brafer Mann, you know: ‘Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen.’ You remember? Heine? You readt Heine still? Who is your favorite boet now, Passil? You write some boetry yourself yet? No? Well, I am gladt to zee you. Brush those baperss off of that jair. Well, idt is goodt for zore eyess. How didt you findt where I life?”

  “They told me at Maroni’s,” said March. He tried to keep his eyes on Lindau’s face and not see the discomfort of the room, but he was aware of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the leaf of the writing desk. He laid down on the mass the pile of foreign magazines he had brought under his arm. “They gave me another address first.”

  “Yes. I have chust gome here,” said Lindau. “Idt is not very cay, heigh?”

  “It might be gayer,” March admitted, with a smile. “Still,” he added soberly, “a good many people seem to live in this part of the town. Apparently they die here too, Lindau. There is crape on your outside door. I didn’t know but it was for you.”

  “Nodt this time,” said Lindau, in the same humor. “Berhaps some other time. We geep the ondertakers bretty pusy down here.”

  “Well,” said March, “undertakers must live, even if the rest of us have to die to let them.” Lindau laughed, and March went on: “But I’m glad it isn’t your funeral, Lindau. And you say you’re not sick, and so I don’t see why we shouldn’t come to business.”

  “Pusiness?” Lindau lifted his eyebrows. “You gome on pusiness?”

  “And pleasure combined,” said March, and he went on to explain the service he desired at Lindau’s hands.

  The old man listened with serious attention and with assenting nods that culminated in a spoken expression of his willingness to undertake the translations. March waited with a sort of mechanical expectation of his gratitude for the work put in his way, but nothing of the kind came from Lindau, and March was left to say, “Well, everything is understood, then; and I don’t know that I need add that if you ever want any little advance on the work ”

  “I will ask you,” said Lindau quietly, “and I thank you for that. But I can wait; I ton’t needt any money just at bresent.” As if he saw some appeal for greater frankness in March’s eye, he went on: “I tidtn’t gome here begause I was too boor to life anywhere else, and I ton’t stay in pedt begause I couldn’t hafe a fire to geep warm if I wanted it. I’m nodt zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris. I’m a lidtle loaxurious, that is all. If I stay in pedt, it’s zo I can fling money away on somethings else. Heigh?”

  “But what are you living here for, Lindau?” March smiled at the irony lurking in Lindau’s words.

  “Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an aristograt. I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs over on the West Side, and I foundt”—Lindau’s voice lost its jesting quality, and his face darkened—“that I was beginning to forget the boor!”

  “I should have thought,” said March, with impartial interest, “that you might have seen poverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to remind you of its existence.”

  “Nodt like here,” said Lindau. “Andt you must zee it all the dtime—zee it, hear it, smell it, dtaste it—or you forget it. That is what I gome here for. I was begoming a ploated aristograt. I thought I was nodt like these beople down here, when I gome down once to look aroundt; I thought I must be somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself in time, and I gome here among my brothers—the beccars and the thiefs!” A noise made itself heard in the next room, as if the door were furtively opened, and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on a table. “Thiefs!” Lindau repeated, with a shout. “Lidtle thiefs, that gabture your breakfast. Ah! Ha! Ha!” A wild scurrying of feet, joyous cries and tittering, and a slamming door followed upon his explosion, and he resumed in the silence: “Idt is
the children cot pack from school. They gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple. Idt’s one of our lidtle chokes; we onderstand each other; that’s all right. Once the goppler in the other room there he use to chase ‘em; he couldn’t onderstand their lidtle tricks. Now dot goppler’s teadt, and he ton’t chase ’em anymore. He was a Bohemian. Gindt of grazy, I cuess.”

  “Well, it’s a sociable existence,” March suggested. “But perhaps if you let them have the things without stealing—”

  “Oh no, no! Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt. They mostn’t go and feel themselfs petter than those boor millionairss that hadt to steal their money.”

  March smiled indulgently at his old friend’s violence. “Oh, there are fagots and fagots, you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionaires are so guilty.”

  “Let us speak German,” cried Lindau in his own tongue, pushing his book aside and thrusting his skull-cap back from his forehead. “How much money can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other man?”

  “Well, if you’ll let me answer in English,” said March, “I should say about five thousand dollars a year. I name that figure because it’s my experience that I never could earn more; but the experience of other men may be different, and if they tell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or fifty thousand a year, I’m not prepared to say they can’t do it.”

  Lindau hardly waited for his answer. “Not the most gifted man that ever lived, in the practice of any art or science and paid at the highest rate that exceptional genius could justly demand from those who have worked for their money, could ever earn a million dollars. It is the landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal barons (the oppressors whom you instinctively give the titles of tyrants)—it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them. What artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet, was ever a millionaire?”

  “I can only think of the poet Rogers,” said March, amused by Lindau’s tirade. “But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers, the martyr, who died with warm feet.” Lindau had apparently not understood his joke, and he went on, with the American ease of mind about everything: “But you must allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don’t do so badly with their guilty gains. Some of them give work to armies of poor people—”

  Lindau furiously interrupted. “Yes, when they have gathered their millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they ‘give work’ to the poor! They give work! They allow their helpless brothers to earn enough to keep life in them! They give work! Who is it gives toil, and where will your rich men be when once the poor shall refuse to give toil? Why, you have come to give me work!”

  March laughed outright. “Well, I’m not a millionaire, anyway, Lindau, and I hope you won’t make an example of me by refusing to give toil. I daresay the millionaires deserve it, but I’d rather they wouldn’t suffer in my person.”

  “No,” returned the old man mildly, relaxing the fierce glare he had bent upon March. “No man deserves to suffer at the hands of another. I lose myself when I think of the injustice in the world. But I must not forget that I am like the worst of them.”

  “You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among the rich awhile, when you’re in danger of that,” suggested March. “At any rate,” he added by an impulse which he knew he could not justify to his wife, “I wish you’d come someday and lunch with their emissary. I’ve been telling Mrs. March about you, and I want her and the children to see you. Come over with these things and report.” He put his hand on the magazines as he rose.

  “I will come,” said Lindau gently.

  “Shall I give you your book?” asked March.

  “No; I gidt oap bretty soon.”

  “And—and—can you dress yourself?”

  “I vhistle, and one of those lidtle fellowss comess. We haf to dake gare of one another in a blace like this. Idt iss nodt like the worldt,” said Lindau gloomily.

  March thought he ought to cheer him up. “Oh, it isn’t such a bad world, Lindau! After all, the average of millionaires is small in it.” He added, “And I don’t believe there’s an American living that could look at that arm of yours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one you gave us all.” March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled slightly in saying it.

  Lindau smiled grimly. “You think zo? I wouldn’t moch like to drost ’em. I’ve driedt idt too often.” He began to speak German again fiercely, “Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine slave drivers and mill serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave—Ha! Ha! Ha!—whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold. And you think I would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?”

  “I’m sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau,” said March; “very sorry.” He stopped with a look of pain and rose to go. Lindau suddenly broke into a laugh and into English.

  “Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt. My parg is worse than my pidte, I cuess. I pring these things roundt bretty soon. Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy. Auf Wiedersehen!”

  XIII

  MARCH WENT AWAY thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but in connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable. In his own life of comfortable revery he had never heard anyone talk so before, but he had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers’ meeting he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had made his own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.

  He could not doubt Lindau’s sincerity, and he wondered how he came to that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for a prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau’s reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect; he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away with by his phrases.

  But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of every gambler’s chance in speculation and all a schemer’s thrift from the error and need of others. The situation was not more incongruous, however, than all the rest of the Every Other Week affair. It seemed to him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its existence, and as time went on and the day drew near for the issue of the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at moments the quality of a waking fact and came to be rather a fantastic fiction of sleep.

  Yet the heterogeneous forces did cooperate to a reality which March could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form. As a result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first advance copy was laid upon his desk. Every detail of it was tiresomely familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now. He now saw how extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton’s decorative design for the cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of the paper. It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape. The touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number. As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of a hummingbird and
the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their illustrative process and had worked it for all it was worth. There were seven papers in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and he had found some graphic comment for each. It was a larger proportion than would afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed. Fulkerson said they could not expect to get their money back on that first number anyway. Seven of the illustrations were Beaton’s; two or three he got from practiced hands; the rest were the work of unknown people which he had suggested, and then related and adapted with unfailing ingenuity to the different papers. He handled the illustrations with such sympathy as not to destroy their individual quality and that indefinable charm which comes from good amateur work in whatever art. He rescued them from their weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidence of the pleasure with which a clever young man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman had done them. Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the art of the number acquired homogeneity, and there was nothing casual in its appearance. The result, March eagerly owned, was better than the literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be sold and praised chiefly for its pictures. Yet he was not ashamed of the literature, and he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because he had not only not written it, but in a way had not edited it. To be sure, he had chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it all together for that number; it had largely put itself together, as every number of every magazine does and as it seems more and more to do in the experience of every editor. There had to be, of course, a story, and then a sketch of travel. There was a literary essay and a social essay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the new fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian realism, which the editor owed to Lindau’s exploration of the foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of the Victor Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoevski was good of its kind. The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look into simpler and wholesomer experiences.