A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too good—too good from every point of view. The cover was too good, and the paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the highest genius. It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide. Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he said, in abject gratitude at Beaton’s feet, though he had his qualms, his questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since Balaam’s. “We’re all asses, of course,” he admitted, in semiapology to March; “but we’re no such asses as Beaton.” He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give, but it must never happen again. He implored March to promise that it should never happen again; he said their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair. It was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped. These were the expressions of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation. His pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to everyone whom he could get to talk with him about it. He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the utmost. He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in the good cause, as he called it. He joined in the applause when a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson’s introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into the surviving spectators. He stood treat upon all occasions, and he lunched attaches of the press at all hours. He especially befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as literary gossip. Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson’s ingenuity was equal to every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that she had been possessed of exclusive information. There was a moment when March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed. Afterward, when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions and of the personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

  Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said that he would do that or anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of female correspondents.

  March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York. But first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong. In spite of the quality of the magazine and in spite of the kindness which so many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor. A merit in the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults. He owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so-and-so against it he could have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known the counting room was at the bottom of it. As it was, he could only attribute it to perversity or stupidity. It was certainly stupid to condemn a magazine novelty like Every Other Week for being novel; and to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious. The fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground but its own.

  XIV

  THE MORE MARCH thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more bitterly he resented it; and his wife’s indignation superheated his own. Every Other Week had become a very personal affair with the whole family; the children shared their parents’ disgust; Bella was outspoken in her denunciations of a venal press. Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston and an establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year. She shed some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him and should not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.

  “Oh, hold on, hold on!” he protested. “You don’t think we’ve made a failure, do you?”

  “Why, of course,” she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.

  “Well, I guess we’ll wait for the official count, first. Even New York hasn’t gone against us, and I guess there’s a majority coming down to Harlem River that could sweep everything before it anyway.”

  “What do you mean, Fulkerson?” March demanded sternly.

  “Oh, nothing! Merely that the News Company has ordered ten thousand now; and you know we had to give them the first twenty on commission.”

  “What do you mean?” March repeated; his wife held her breath.

  “I mean that the first number is a booming success already and that it’s going to a hundred thousand before it stops. That unanimity and variety of censure in the morning papers, combined with the attractiveness of the thing itself, has cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favor of the country press doesn’t turn the tide against us, our fortune’s made.” The Marches remained dumb. “Why, look here! Didn’t I tell you those criticisms would be the making of us, when they first began to turn you blue this morning, March?”

  “He came home to lunch perfectly sick,” said Mrs. March; “and I wouldn’t let him go back again.”

  “Didn’t I tell you so?” Fulkerson persisted.

  March could not remember that he had or that he had been anything but incoherently and hysterically jocose over the papers, but he said, “Yes, yes—I think so.”

  “I knew it from the start,” said Fulkerson. “The only other person who took those criticisms in the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos—I’ ve just been bolstering up the Dryfoos family. She had them read to her by Mrs. Mandel and she understood them to be all the most flattering prophecies of success. Well, I didn’t read between the lines to that extent, quite; but I saw that they were going to help us, if there was anything in us, more than anything that could have been done. And there was something in us! I tell you, March, that seven-shooting self-cocking donkey of a Beaton has given us the greatest start! He’s caught on like a mice. He’s made the thing awfully chic; it’s jimmy; there’s lots of dog about it. He’s managed that process so that the illustrations look as expensive as first-class woodcuts, and they’re cheaper than chromos. He’s put style into the whole thing.”

  “Oh, yes,” said March, with eager meekness, “it’s Beaton that’s done it.”


  Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March’s face. “Beaton has given us the start because his work appeals to the eye. There’s no denying that the pictures have sold this first number; but I expect the literature of this first number to sell the pictures of the second. I’ve been reading it all over, nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping; I was anxious about it, and I tell you, old man, it’s good. Yes, sir! I was afraid maybe you had got it too good, with that Boston refinement of yours; but I reckon you haven’t. I’ll risk it. I don’t see how you got so much variety into so few things, and all of them palpitant, all of’em on the keen jump with actuality.”

  The mixture of American slang with the jargon of European criticism in Fulkerson’s talk made March smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it in her exultation. “That is just what I say,” she broke in. “It’s perfectly wonderful. I never was anxious about it a moment, except, as you say, Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good.”

  They went on in an antiphony of praise till March said, “Really, I don’t see what’s left me but to strike for higher wages. I perceive that I’m indispensable.”

  “Why, old man, you’re coming in on the divvy, you know,” said Fulkerson.

  They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her husband what a divvy was.

  “It’s a chicken before it’s hatched.”

  “No! Truly?”

  He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.

  At Mrs. Leighton’s, Fulkerson gave Alma all the honor of the success; he told her mother that the girl’s design for the cover had sold every number, and Mrs. Leighton believed him.

  “Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory,” Miss Woodburn pouted. “Where am Ah comin’ in?”

  “You’re coming in on the cover of the next number,” said Fulkerson. “We’re going to have your face there; Miss Leighton’s going to sketch it in.” He said this reckless of the fact that he had already shown them the design of the second number, which was Beaton’s weird bit of gas-country landscape.

  “Ah don’t see why you don’t wrahte the fiction for your magazine, Mr. Fulkerson,” said the girl.

  This served to remind Fulkerson of something. He turned to her father. “I’ll tell you what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some chapters of that book of yours. I’ve been talking to him about it.”

  “I do not think it would add to the popularity of your periodical, sir,” said the Colonel, with a stately pleasure in being asked. “My views of a civilization based upon responsible slavery would hardly be acceptable to your commercialized society.”

  “Well, not as a practical thing, of course,” Fulkerson admitted. “But as something retrospective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit. There’s so much going on now about social questions; I guess people would like to read it.”

  “I do not know that my work is intended to amuse people,” said the Colonel, with some state.

  “Mah goodness! Ah only wish it was, then,” said his daughter. And she added, “Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit po‘tions of his woak to yo’ edito’. We want to have some of the honaw. Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo’ magazine, if we didn’t help to stawt it.”

  They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said, “It’ll take a good deal more than that to stop Every Other Week. The Colonel’s whole book couldn’t do it.” Then he looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not seem to enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn came to his rescue. “You maght illustrate it with the po’trait of the awthor’s daughtaw, if it’s too late for the covah.”

  “Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn,” he cried.

  “Oh, mah goodness!” she said, with mock humility.

  Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined against the lamp, as she sat working by the table. “Just keep still a moment!”

  She got her sketchblock and pencils, and began to draw; Fulkerson tilted himself forward and looked over her shoulder; he smiled outwardly; inwardly he was divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn’s arch beauty and appreciation of the skill which reproduced it; at the same time he was trying to remember whether March had authorized him to go so far as to ask for a sight of Colonel Woodburn’s manuscript. He felt that he had trenched upon March’s province, and he framed one apology to the editor for bringing him the manuscript, and another to the author for bringing it back.

  “Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?” asked Miss Woodburn. “Can Ah toak?”

  “Talk all you want,” said Alma, squinting her eyes. “And you needn’t be either adamantine, nor yet—wooden.”

  “Oh, ho’ very good of you! Well, if Ah can toak—go on, Mr. Fulkerson!”

  “Me talk? I can’t breathe till this thing is done!” sighed Fulkerson; at that point of his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustily about the return of his manuscript, and he felt that he was looking his last on Miss Woodburn’s profile.

  “Is she getting it raght?” asked the girl.

  “I don’t know which is which,” said Fulkerson.

  “Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! I don’t want to go round feelin’ like a sheet of papah half the time.”

  “You could rattle on, just the same,” suggested Alma.

  “Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson. Do you call that any way to toak to people?”

  “You might know which you were by the color,” Fulkerson began, and then he broke off from the personal consideration with a business inspiration and smacked himself on the knee; “we could print it in color!”

  Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it with both hands in her lap, while she came round and looked critically at the sketch and the model over her glasses. “It’s very good, Alma,” she said.

  Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side of the table. “Of course, Mr. Fulkerson, you were jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing a sketch of my daughter.”

  “Why, I don’t know—If you object—”

  “I do, sir—decidedly,” said the Colonel.

  “Then that settles it, of course,” said Fulkerson. “I only meant—”

  “Indeed it doesn’t!” cried the girl. “Who’s to know who it’s from? Ah’m jost set on havin’ it printed! Ah’m going to appear as the head of Slavery—in opposition to the head of Liberty.”

  “There’ll be a revolution inside of forty-eight hours, and we’ll have the Colonel’s system going wherever a copy of Every Other Week circulates,” said Fulkerson.

  “This sketch belongs to me,” Alma interposed. “I’m not going to let it be printed.”

  “Oh, mah goodness!” said Miss Woodburn, laughing good-humoredly. “That’s becose you were brought up to hate slavery.”

  “I should like Mr. Beaton to see it,” said Mrs. Leighton in a sort of absent tone. She added, to Fulkerson: “I rather expected he might be in, tonight.”

  “Well, if he comes, we’ll leave it to Beaton,” Fulkerson said, with relief in the solution and an anxious glance at the Colonel across the table to see how he took that form of the joke. Miss Woodburn intercepted his glance and laughed, and Fulkerson laughed too, but rather forlornly.

  Alma set her lips primly and turned her head first on one side and then on the other to look at the sketch. “I don’t think we’ll leave it to Mr. Beaton, even if he comes.”

  “We left the other design for the cover to Beaton,” Fulkerson insinuated. “I guess you needn’t be afraid of him.”

  “Is it a question of my being afraid?” Alma asked; she seemed coolly intent on her drawing.

  “Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of her,” Miss Woodburn explained.

  “It’s a question of his courage, then?” said Alma.

  “Well, I don’t think there are many young ladies that Beaton’s afraid of,” said Fulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purely random remark, while he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and Colo
nel Woodburn for some light upon the tendency of their daughters’ words.

  He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton’s saying, with a certain anxiety, “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Fulkerson.”

  “Well, you’re as much in the dark as I am myself, then,” said Fulkerson. “I suppose I meant that Beaton is rather—a—favorite, you know. The women like him.”

  Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose and left the room.

  XV

  IN THE SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other with dismay. “I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow,” he suggested, and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.

  “Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson! Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson! Papa thoat you wanted him to go.”

  “Wanted him to go?” repeated Fulkerson.

  “We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want to get rid of Papa.”

  “Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that he didn’t take much interest in Beaton, as a general topic. But I don’t know that I ever saw it drive him out of the room before.”

  “Well, he isn’t always so bad,” said Miss Woodburn. “But it was a case of hate at first sight, and it seems to be growin’ on Papa.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” said Fulkerson. “The impulse to destroy Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against, at the start.”

  “I must say, Mr. Fulkerson,” said Mrs. Leighton in the tremor through which she nerved herself to differ openly with anyone she liked, “I never had to struggle with anything of the kind in regard to Mr. Beaton. He has always been most respectful and—and considerate, with me, whatever he has been with others.”

  “Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!” Fulkerson came back in a soothing tone. “But you see you’re the rule that proves the exception. I was speaking of the way men felt about Beaton. It’s different with ladies; I just said so.”