A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes,” Fulkerson answered; “and that ain’t quite the style—that little wiggly-waggly blue flame—that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of it. This might do for weak gas.” And he went on to explain: “They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down, and anybody can sink a well in his backyard and get enough gas to light and heat his house. I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a pipe through a flower bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My, my, my! You fel—you gentlemen ought to go out and see that country, all of you. Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let ‘em see how it works! Mind that one you torpedoed for me? You know, when they sink a well,” he went on to the company, “they can’t always most generally sometimes tell whether they’re goin’ to get gas or oil or saltwater. Why, when they first began to bore for saltwater out on the Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn’t ripe for gas yet. Now they bore away sometimes till they get halfway to China and don’t seem to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they call a go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud and saltwater and rocks and pitch-forks and adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick’s painted—got a coat on that’ll wear in any climate. That’s what our honored host meant. Generally get some visiting lady, when there’s one round, to drop the go-devil. But that day we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I declined. I told ’em I hadn’t much practice with go-devils in the newspaper-syndicate business, and I wasn’t very well myself anyway. Astonishing,” Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, “how reckless they get using dynamite when they’re torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of ‘em in his hand and began to pound it on the buggy wheel to show us how safe it was. I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he was the fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he’d keep on hammering that cartridge, just to show that it wouldn’t explode, till he blew you into kingdom come. When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman. ‘Pay Sheney off and discharge him on the spot,’ says he. ‘He’s too safe a man to have round; he knows altogether too much about dynamite.’ I never saw anybody so cool.”

  Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson’s flattery, and without lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn. “I had all sorts of men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very little trouble with them, generally speaking.”

  “Ah, ah! You foundt the laboring man reasonable—dractable—tocile?” Lindau put in.

  “Yes, generally speaking,” Dryfoos answered. “They mostly knew which side of their bread was buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there. Some of the men tried to form a union—”

  “No, no!” cried Fulkerson. “Let me tell that! I know you wouldn’t do yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want ’em to know how a strike can be managed, if you take it in time. You see, some of those fellows got a notion that there ought to be a union among the working men to keep up wages and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos’ foreman was the ringleader in the business. They understood pretty well that as soon as he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted him—everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds—and then they come to him and told him to sign a promise to keep that foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them all knock off. Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mice, but he couldn’t tell where the mice was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course. There wasn’t anything really against the fellow anyway; he was a first-rate man, and he did his duty every time; only he’d got some of those ideas into his head, and they turned it. Mr. Dryfoos signed, and then he laid low.”

  March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity and heard him murmur in German, “Shameful! Shameful!”

  Fulkerson went on: “Well, it wasn’t long before they began to show their hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark. He agreed to everything; there never was such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn’t a thing they asked of him that he didn’t do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry as a marriage bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen Pinkertons with rifles at half cock, and about fifty fellows found themselves out of a job. You never saw such a mad set.”

  “Pretty neat,” said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an aesthetic point of view. “Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in a play.”

  “That was vile treason,” said Lindau in German, to March. “He’s an infamous traitor! I cannot stay here. I must go.”

  He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat and implored him under his voice, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t, Lindau! You owe it to yourself not to make a scene, if you come here.” Something in it all affected him comically; he could not help laughing.

  The others were discussing the matter and seemed not to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: “You are right. I must have patience.”

  Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, “Pity your Pinkertons couldn’t have given them a few shots before they left.”

  “No, that wasn’t necessary,” said Dryfoos. “I succeeded in breaking up the union. I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ any man who would not swear that he was nonunion. If they had attempted violence, of course they could have been shot. But there was no fear of that. Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut each other’s throats in the long run.”

  “But sometimes,” said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching for a chance to mount his hobby again, “they make a good deal of trouble first. How was it in the great railroad strike of ’77?”

  “Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, Colonel,” said Fulkerson. “But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end.”

  “Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always. But it’s the exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected. And a little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a danger of the exceptional in your system. The fact is those fellows have the game in their own hands already. A strike of the whole body of the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given points, and your government couldn’t move a man over the roads without the help of the engineers. ”

  “That is so,” said Kendricks, struck by the dramatic character of the conjecture. He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as something already accomplished.

  “Why don’t some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?” said Fulkerson. “It would be a card.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson,” said Kendricks.

  Fulkerson laughed. “Telepathy—clear case of mind-transference. Better see March here about it. I’d like to have it in Every Other Week. It would make talk.”

  “Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking,” said the Colonel.

  “Well, sir,” said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his imperial stuck straight outward, “if I had my way, there wouldn’t be
any Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole country.”

  “What!” shouted Lindau. “You vould sobbress the unionss of the voarking men?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidatists— the drosts, and gompines, and boolss? Would you dake the right from one and gife it to the odder?”

  “Yes, sir, I would,” said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.

  Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say in German, “But it is infamous—infamous! What kind of man is this? Who is he? He has the heart of a tyrant.”

  Colonel Woodburn cut in. “You couldn’t do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your system. And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws and that kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected. Your commercialized society has built its house on the sands. It will have to go. But I should be sorry if it went before its time.”

  “You are righdt, sir,” said Lindau. “It would be a bity. I hobe it will last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour gomes, when it trops to bieces with the veight of its own gorrubtion—what then?”

  “It’s not: to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice,” said the Colonel. “But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility—responsibility. The enlightened, the moneyed, the recultivated class shall be responsible to the central authority—emperor, duke, president; the name does not matter—for the national expense and the national defense, and it shall be responsible to the working classes of all kinds for homes and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times. The working classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the support of its dignity in peace and shall be subject to its command in war. The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the ruin that now follows against danger from without and famine from within, and the poor—”

  “No, no, no!” shouted Lindau. “The state shall do that—the whole beople. The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that will not voark, they shall sdarfe. But no man need sdarfe. He will go to the state, and the state will see that he haf voark and that he haf foodt. All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople’s and be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall be no rich and no boor; and there shall not be war anymore, for what bower wouldt dare to addack a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?”

  “Lion and lamb act,” said Fulkerson, not well knowing after so much champagne what words he was using.

  No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, “You are talking paternalism, sir.”

  “And you are dalking feudalism!” retorted the old man.

  The Colonel did not reply. A silence ensued, which no one broke till Fulkerson said: “Well now, look here. If either one of these millenniums was brought about by force of arms or otherwise, what would become of Every Other Week? Who would want March for an editor? How would Beaton sell his pictures? Who would print Mr. Kendricks’ little society verses and short stories? What would become of Conrad and his good works?” Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson’s diversion, but Lindau and the Colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning. A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one. “Ah,” he said as he bit off the end and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece, where the brandy was still feebly flickering, “I wonder if there’s enough natural gas left to light my cigar.” His effort put the flame out and knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerson cackled over the ruin: “I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after labor and capital have fought it out together. I hope this ain’t ominous of anything personal, Dryfoos?”

  “I’ll take the risk of it,” said the old man harshly.

  He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi’s man, “You can bring us the coffee in the library.”

  The talk did not recover itself there. Lindau would not sit down; he refused coffee and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company; Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round when he had smoked his cigar; the others followed him. It seemed to March that his own good night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.

  VII

  MARCH MET FULKERSON on the steps of the office next morning, where he arrived rather later than his wont. Fulkerson did not show any of the signs of suffering from the last night’s pleasure which painted themselves in March’s face. He flirted his hand gaily in the air and said, “How’s your poor head?” and broke into a knowing laugh. “You don’t seem to have got up with the lark this morning. The old gentleman is in there with Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he’s beat you down. Well, we did have a good time, didn’t we? And old Lindau and the Colonel, didn’t they have a good time? I don’t suppose they ever had a chance before to give their theories quite so much air. Oh my, how they did ride over us! I’m just going down to see Beaton about the cover of the Christmas number. I think we ought to try it in three or four colors, if we are going to observe the day at all.” He was off before March could pull himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted at the office at that hour of the morning; he always came in the afternoon on his way uptown.

  The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivings with which March had parted from him the night before, but Fulkerson’s cheerfulness seemed to gainsay them; afterward March did not know whether to attribute this mood to the slipperiness that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson or to a cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving him alone to the old man, who mounted to his room shortly after March had reached it.

  A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; his jaw was set so firmly that he did not seem able at once to open it. He asked, without the ceremonies of greeting, “What does that one-armed Dutchman do on this book?”

  “What does he do?” March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question that is mandatory and offensive.

  “Yes, sir, what does he do? Does he write for it?”

  “I suppose you mean Lindau,” said March. He saw no reason for refusing to answer Dryfoos’ demand, and he decided to ignore its terms. “No, he doesn’t write for it in the usual way. He translates for it; he examines the foreign magazines and draws my attention to anything he thinks of interest. But I told you about this before—”

  “I know what you told me well enough. And I know what he is. He is a red-mouthed labor agitator. He’s one of those foreigners that come here from places where they’ve never had a decent meal’s victuals in their lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full they begin to make trouble between our people and their hands. There’s where the strikes come from, and the unions, and the secret societies. They come here and break our Sabbath and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung! Let ’em go back if they don’t like it over here. They want to ruin the country.”

  March could not help smiling a little at the words, which came fast enough now in the hoarse staccato of Dryfoos’ passion. “I don’t know whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don’t always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and kindest souls in the world, and he is no more an atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can’t allow him to be misunderstood.”

  “I don’t care what he is,” Dryfoos broke out, “I won’t have him round. He can’t have any more work from this office. I want you to stop it. I want you to turn him off.”

  March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when he entered. He now sat down and began to open his letters.

  “Do you hear?” the old man roared at him. “I want you to turn him off.”


  “Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos,” said March, succeeding in an effort to speak calmly, “I don’t know you, in such a matter as this. My arrangements as editor of Every Other Week were made with Mr. Fulkerson. I have always listened to any suggestion he has had to make.”

  “I don’t care for Mr. Fulkerson! He has nothing to do with it,” retorted I)ryfoos; but he seemed a little daunted by March’s position.

  “He has everything to do with it as far as I am concerned,” March answered, with a steadiness that he did not feel. “I know that you are the owner of the periodical, but I can’t receive any suggestion from you for the reason that I have given. Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any right to talk with me about its management.”

  Dryfoos glared at him for a moment and demanded threateningly : “Then you say you won’t turn that old loafer off? You say that I have got to keep on paying my money out to buy beer for a man that would cut my throat if he got the chance?”

  “I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos,” March answered. The blood came into his face, and he added: “But I will say that if you speak again of Mr. Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this room. I will not hear you.”

  Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struck his hat down on his head and stamped out of the room and down the stairs; and a vague pity came into March’s heart that was not altogether for himself. He might be the greater sufferer in the end, but he was sorry to have got the better of that old man for the moment ; and he felt ashamed of the anger into which Dryfoos’ anger had surprised him. He knew he could not say too much in defense of Lindau’s generosity and unselfishness, and he had not attempted to defend him as a political economist. He could not have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and he felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive instructions or commands from him. Yet somehow he was not satisfied with the whole affair, and not merely because his present triumph threatened his final advantage, but because he felt that in his heat he had hardly done justice to Dryfoos’ rights in the matter; it did not quite console him to reflect that Dryfoos had himself made it impossible. He was tempted to go home and tell his wife what had happened, and begin his preparations for the future at once. But he resisted this weakness and kept mechanically about his work, opening the letters and the manuscripts before him with that curious double action of the mind common in men of vivid imaginations. It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, having apparently waited to make sure that his father would not return, came up from the counting room and looked in on March with a troubled face.