She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday and dining about hither and thither with Fulkerson. Once, he had dined with him at the widow’s (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the gallery overlooking the backyard. They were all spending the summer in New York. The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St. Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it, and the Woodburns found New York a watering place of exemplary coolness after the burning Augusts and Septembers of Charlottesburg.
“You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir,” the Colonel explained, “till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs well into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir. It’s never quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it’s hot longer, sir.” He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a famous Southwestern editor, who spent all his summers in a New York hotel, as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea, and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather. The Colonel had not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctant to leave town, where he was working up a branch of the inquiry which had so long occupied him in the libraries and studying the great problem of labor and poverty as it continually presented itself to him in the streets. He said that he talked with all sorts of people, whom he found monstrously civil if you took them in the right way; and he went everywhere in the city without fear and apparently without danger. March could not find out that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of want which he visited or had proposed their enslavement to the inmates as a short and simple solution of the great question of their lives; he appeared to have contented himself with the collection of facts for the persuasion of the cultivated classes. It seemed to March a confirmation of this impression that the Colonel should address his deductions from these facts so unsparingly to him; he listened with a respectful patience, for which Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it was not often the Colonel found such a good listener; generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were shocking, but honored him for holding them so conscientiously. Fulkerson was glad that March, as the literary department, had treated the old gentleman so well, because there was an open feud between him and the art department. Beaton was outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as for that, the old Colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself and gave Beaton an unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerliness. The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as much as she respected the Colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather more than Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had noticed them together. March had noticed them but without any very definite impression, except that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening to the girl. Afterward he recollected that he had fancied her rather harassed by his devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present for his wife’s opinion.
“Girls often put on that air,” she said. “It’s one of their ways of teasing. But then, if the man was really very much in love and she was only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem troubled. It would be a very serious question. Girls often don’t know what to do in such a case.”
“Yes,” said March, “I’ve often been glad that I was not a girl on that account. But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in love than she is. I couldn’t imagine that young man being more in love with anybody, unless it was himself. He might be more in love with himself than anyone else was.”
“Well, he doesn’t interest me a great deal, and I can’t say Miss Leighton does either. I think she can take care of herself. She has herself very well in hand.”
“Why so censorious?” pleaded March. “I don’t defend her for having herself in hand; but is it a fault?”
Mrs. March did not say. She asked, “And how does Mr. Fulkerson’s affair get on?”
“His affair? You really think it is one? Well, I’ve fancied so myself, and I’ve had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as truly domesticable, conjugable at heart, but I’ve waited for him to speak.”
“I should think so.”
“Yes. He’s never opened on the subject yet. I think Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy.”
“Moments! He’s all delicacy in regard to women.”
“Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising instincts.”
IV
THE DRYFOOS FAMILY stayed in town till August. Then the father went west again to look after his interests, and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to one of the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson said that he had never seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the year. She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to know whether it was still so or not. In this, as in so many other matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of Dryfoos’ angry determination that he should not run the family and in spite of Christine’s doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself. She thought that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services. The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel’s quadrangle enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that they were of the best there. But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel was so particular that Mela was prevented from continuing the acquaintance even of the few young men who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops. They drove about, but they went to places without knowing why, except that the carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges of a proud exclusivism without desiring them. Once a motherly matron seemed to perceive their isolation and made overtures to them, but then desisted, as if repelled by Christine’s suspicion or by Mela’s too instant and hilarious good-fellowship; which expressed itself in hoarse laughter and in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom. From time to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was only there they would have a good time; she wondered what they were all doing in New York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about Beaton and asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up there.
Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them. Some banter had passed between them to this effect; he said he should take them in on his way home to Syracuse. Christine would not have hesitated to write to him and remind him of his promise, but she had learned to distrust her literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of writing which dropped out of her music book one night. She believed that he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers, but she felt that she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper; she could manage with him in talking; she was too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then. Through her own passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she was graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not understand that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular features that piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her black eyes beyond her intelligence and intention. Once he sketched her as they sat together, and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in it; he said he must try her sometime in color, and he said things which, when she made Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more than anybody else. He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested content in a girl’s indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her thought went beyond love making to
marriage, she believed that she could have him if she wanted him. Her father’s money counted in this; she divined that Beaton was poor, but that made no difference; she would have enough for both; the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there had been no other.
The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike with which Dryfoos regarded it, but now when Beaton did not come to Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and Christine’s content with it. She bore the trial as long as she could; she used pride and resentment against it, but at last she could not bear it, and with Mela’s help she wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York and playfully boasting of Saratoga. It seemed to them both that it was a very bright letter and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of the words right. Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that they were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it was no difference if they were wrong. But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh of Beaton’s, and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the spelling. Christine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said she knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round her. Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; she forbade them to send the letter, and Mela failed to get round her, though she threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong words, that she would send the letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them both home. When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of having mismanaged the whole business; she quarreled with her, and they called each other names. Christine declared that she would not stay in Saratoga and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her she should go alone. They returned the first week in September, but by that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.
Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went west. He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, where the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the winter had sent some of their wards for the summer. It was not possible to keep his recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching farmwork among those paupers and potential reprobates. He invented details of his experience among them, and March could not always help joining in the laugh at Conrad’s humorless helplessness under Fulkerson’s burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.
They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business, and they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness than before. Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great depth perhaps, but broad and underlying his whole point of view; he made light of Beaton’s solemnity, as he made light of Conrad’s humanity. The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than the publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager’s hands; but when he had been led on by Fulkerson’s flatteries to make some betrayal of egotism, he brooded over it till he had thought how to revenge himself in elaborate insult. For Beaton’s talent Fulkerson never lost his admiration, but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of being the sole source of the magazine’s prosperity. No bait of this sort was too obvious for Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as often as Fulkerson chose, though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the motives of people in saying things. With March he got on no better than at first. He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then with anticipative reprisal. After these rebuffs the editor delivered him over to the manager, who could turn Beaton’s contrary-mindedness to account by asking the reverse of what he really wanted done. This was what Fulkerson said; the fact was that he did get on with Beaton, and March contented himself with musing upon the contradictions of a character at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so conscious and so simple.
After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased to feel the disagreeable fact of the old man’s mastery of the financial situation. None of the chances which might have made it painful occurred; the control of the whole affair remained in Fulkerson’s hands; before he went west again, Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office, as if, having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owning a literary periodical, he was no longer interested in it.
Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did not do without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his office. He seemed willing to leave March with a better impression than he had hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said some civil things about the magazine, as if its success pleased him, and he spoke openly to March of his hope that his son would finally become interested in it to the exclusion of the hopes and purposes which divided them. It seemed to March that in the old man’s warped and toughened heart he perceived a disappointed love for his son greater than for his other children, but this might have been fancy. Lindau came in with some copy while Dryfoos was there, and March introduced them. When Lindau went out, March explained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in the war, and he told him something of Lindau’s career as he had known it. Dryfoos appeared greatly pleased that Every Other Week was giving Lindau work. He said that he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war and had paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later calls for troops. He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined the Anti-Nebraska party in ’55, and he had voted for Fremont and for every Republican President since then.
At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any other contributor, but the old man seemed to think that he must transact all his business with March at his place of business. The transaction had some peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary. Lindau always expected to receive his money when he brought his copy as an acknowledgment of the immediate right of the laborer to his hire, and he would not take it in a check because he did not approve of banks and regarded the whole system of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people’s money. He would receive his pay only from March’s hand, because he wished to be understood as working for him and honestly earning money honestly earned; and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at letting the old man share the increase of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos’, but he shook off the feeling. As the summer advanced and the artists and classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after another, he gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in the office of Every Other Week. It was pleasant for March to see the respect with which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for the sake of his wound and his gray beard. There was something delicate and fine in it, and there was nothing unkindly on Fulkerson’s part in the hostilities which usually passed between him and Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverently at times too, but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage ship-shape. On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to start him on the theme of the unduly rich; he made himself the champion of monopolies and enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of capital; he said that it did him good.
One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau’s scorn, he said, “Well, I understand that although you despise me now, Lindau—”
“I ton’t desbise you,” the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and his eyes flaming with excitement; “I bity you.”
“Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end,” said Fulkerson. “What I understand is that you pity me now as the slave of capital, but you would pity me a great deal more if I was the master of it.”
“How you mean?”
“If I was rich.�
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“That would tebendt,” said Lindau, trying to control himself. “If you hat inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mate it, efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to ask how you mate it, and if you hat mate moch, he would know—”
“Hold on; hold on now, Lindau! Ain’t that rather un-American doctrine? We’re all brought up, ain’t we, to honor the man that made his money, and look down—or try to look down; sometimes it’s difficult—on the fellow that his father left it to?”
The old man rose and struck his breast. “On-Amerigan!” he roared, and as he went on, his accent grew more and more uncertain. “What iss Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga anymore! You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery man de righdt to life, liperty, and de bursuit of habbiness. And where haf you entedt ? No man that vorks vith his handts among you hass the liperty to bursue his habbiness. He iss the slafe of some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindts him down to the least he can lif on and that rops him of the marchin of his earnings that he might pe habby on. Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down goldt, as you say! You ton’t puy foters; you puy lechislatures and goncressmen; you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors; you bay infentors not to infent; you atfertise, and the gounting room sees dat de etitorial room toesn’t tink.”
“Yes, we’ve got a little arrangement of that sort with March here,” said Fulkerson.
“Oh, I am sawry,” said the old man contritely. “I meant noting bersonal. I ton’t tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there are goodt men. But gabidal”—his passion rose again—“where you find gabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togeder in fife, ten, tventy years, you findt the smell of tears and ploodt! Dat iss what I say. And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man whether you meet an honest man.”
A Hazard of New Fortunes Page 34