A Hazard of New Fortunes

by William Dean Howells

  “Mr. March,” he began, “I hope Father hasn’t been saying anything to you that you can’t overlook. I know he was very much excited, and when he is excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for.”

  The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so different from any attitude the peremptory old man would have conceivably taken for himself, made March smile. “Oh no. I fancy the boot is on the other leg. I suspect I’ve said some things your father can’t overlook, Conrad.” He called the young man by his Christian name partly to distinguish him from his father, partly from the infection of Fulkerson’s habit, and partly from a kindness for him that seemed naturally to express itself in that way.

  “I know he didn’t sleep last night after you all went away,” Conrad pursued, “and of course that made him more irritable; and he was tried a good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said.”

  “I was tried a good deal myself,” said March. “Lindau ought never to have been there.”

  “No.” Conrad seemed only partially to assent.

  “I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break out in some way. It wasn’t just to him, and it wasn’t just to your father, to ask him.”

  “Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive,” Conrad gently urged. “He did it because he hurt his feelings that day about the pension.”

  “Yes; but it was a mistake. He knew that Lindau was inflexible about his principles, as he calls them, and that one of his first principles is to denounce the rich, in season and out of season. I don’t remember just what he said last night, and I really thought I’d kept him from breaking out in the most offensive way. But your father seems very much incensed.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Conrad.

  “Of course I don’t agree with Lindau. I think there are as many good, kind, just people among the rich as there are among the poor and that they are as generous and helpful. But Lindau has got hold of one of those partial truths that hurt worse than the whole truth, and—”

  “Partial truth!” the young man interrupted. “Didn’t the Saviour himself say, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God’?”

  “Why, bless my soul!” cried March. “Do you agree with Lindau?”

  “I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ,” said the young man solemnly, and a strange light of exaltation, of fanaticism, came into his wide blue eyes. “And I believe he meant the kingdom of heaven upon this earth as well as in the skies.”

  March threw himself back in his chair and looked at him with a kind of stupefaction, in which his eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw Fulkerson standing, it seemed to him a long time, before he heard him saying, “Hello, hello! What’s the row? Conrad pitching into you on old Lindau’s account, too?”

  The young man turned, and after a glance at Fulkerson’s light, smiling face, went out as if in his present mood he could not bear the contact of that persiflant spirit.

  March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again. “Excuse me, Fulkerson, but did you know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted to see me for?”

  “Well, no, I didn’t exactly,” said Fulkerson, taking his usual seat on a chair and looking over the back of it at March. “I saw he was on his ear about something, and I thought I’d better not monkey with him much. I supposed he was going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow.” Fulkerson broke into a laugh.

  March remained serious. “Mr. Dryfoos,” he said, willing to let the simple statement have its own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more, “came in here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from his employment on the magazine—to turn him off, as he put it.”

  “Did he?” asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheerfulness. “The old man is business, every time. Well, I suppose you can easily get somebody else to do Lindau’s work for you. This town is just running over with half-starved linguists. What did you say?”

  “What did I say?” March echoed. “Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard this as a joke, but I don’t. I’m not used to being spoken to as if I were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and cultivated man like Lindau as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if that’s your idea of me—”

  “Oh, hello now, March! You mustn’t mind the old man’s way. He don’t mean anything by it—he don’t know any better, if you come to that.”

  “Then, I know better,” said March. “I refused to receive any instructions from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don’t know in my relations with Every Other Week, and I referred him to you.”

  “You did?” Fulkerson whistled. “He owns the thing!”

  “I don’t care who owns the thing,” said March. “My negotiations were with you alone from the beginning, and I leave this matter with you. What do you wish done about Lindau?”

  “Oh, better let the old fool drop,” said Fulkerson. “He’ll light on his feet somehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus.”

  “And if I decline to let him drop?”

  “Oh, come now, March; don’t do that,” Fulkerson began.

  “If I decline to let him drop,” March repeated, “what will you do?”

  “I’ll be dogged if I know what I’ll do,” said Fulkerson. “I hope you won’t take that stand. If the old man went so far as to speak to you about it, his mind is made up, and we might as well knock under first as last.”

  “And do you mean to say that you would not stand by me in what I considered my duty—in a matter of principle?”

  “Why, of course, March,” said Fulkerson coaxingly, “I mean to do the right thing. But Dryfoos owns the magazine—”

  “He doesn’t own me,” said March, rising. “He has made the little mistake of speaking to me as if he did; and when”—March put on his hat and took his overcoat down from its nail—“when you bring me his apologies or come to say that, having failed to make him understand they were necessary, you are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to this desk. Otherwise my resignation is at your service.”

  He started toward the door, and Fulkerson intercepted him. “Ah, now look here, March. Don’t do that! Hang it all, don’t you see where it leaves me? Now, you just sit down a minute and talk it over. I can make you see—I can show you—Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer! Twenty of him wouldn’t be worth the trouble he’s makin’. Let him go, and the old man’ll come round in time.”

  “I don’t think we’ve understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson,” said March, very haughtily. “Perhaps we never can; but I’ll leave you to think it out.”

  He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let him pass, with a dazed look and a mechanical movement. There was something comic in his rueful bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, but he said to himself that he had as much reason to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not smile. His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to suffer any consequence rather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos; he felt keenly the degradation of his connection with him, and all his resentment of Fulkerson’s original uncandor returned; at the same time his heart ached with foreboding. It was not merely the work in which he had constantly grown happier that he saw taken from him, but he felt the misery of the man who stakes the security and plenty and peace of home upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep from him most that most men find sweet and pleasant in life. He faced the fact, which no good man can front without terror, that he was risking the support of his family, and for a point of pride, of honor, which perhaps he had no right to consider in view of the possible adversity. He realized, as every hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is contrived for his wearing, that he belongs to another, whose will is his law. His indignation was shot with abject impulses to go back and tell Fulkerson that it was all right and that he gave up. To end the anguish of his struggle he quickened his steps, so that he found he was reaching home almost at a run.

  VIII

  HE MUST HAVE MADE more clatter than he supposed with his key at the apartment do
or, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it open. “Why, Basil,” she said, “what’s brought you back? Are you sick? You’re all pale. Well, no wonder! This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson’s dinners you shall go to. You’re not strong enough for it, and your stomach will be all out of order for a week. How hot you are! And in a drip of perspiration! Now you’ll be sick.” She took his hat away, which hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender impatience. “What is the matter? Has anything happened?”

  “Everything has happened,” he said, getting his voice after one or two husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by prolonged cross-questioning.

  At the end she said, “I knew Lindau would get you into trouble.”

  This cut March to the heart. “Isabel!” he cried reproachfully.

  “Oh, I know,” she retorted, and the tears began to come. “I don’t wonder you didn’t want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast. I noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so 1 didn’t insist. I wish I had now. If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should have known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you—”

  “Would you have advised me,” March demanded, “to submit to bullying like that and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty against a man who had once been so much my friend as Lindau?”

  “It was an unlucky day when you met him. I suppose we shall have to go. And just when we had got used to New York and begun to like it. I don’t know where we shall go now; Boston isn’t like home anymore; and we couldn’t live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try. I’m sure I don’t know where we can live on it. I suppose in some country village where there are no schools or anything for the children. I don’t know what they’ll say when we tell them, poor things.”

  Every word was a stab in March’s heart, so weakly tender to his own; his wife’s tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt like a murderer. It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough. He had allowed for trouble, but trouble on his account—a sympathy that might burden and embarrass him—but he had not dreamt of this merely domestic, this petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him wholly out of the question and embraced only what was most crushing and desolating in the prospect. He could not bear it. He caught up his hat again, and with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed out of the house. He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry; then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid, he tried to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.

  He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message or perhaps was waiting there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over now. But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.

  “I told the children,” she said, in smiling explanation of his absence from lunch, “that perhaps you were detained by business. I didn’t know but you had gone back to the office.”

  “Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?” asked March, with a haggard look. “Well, if you say so, I will go back and do what Dryfoos ordered me to do. I’m sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can assure you.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “I approve of everything you did. But sit down now, and don’t keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it perfectly. Of course I had to have my say out.”

  She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again and report his own language precisely. From time to time, as she got his points, she said, “That was splendid,” “Good enough for him!” and, “Oh, I’m so glad you said that to him!” At the end she said, “Well, now let’s look at it from his point of view. Let’s be perfectly just to him before we take another step forward.”

  “Or backward,” March suggested ruefully. “The case is simply this: he owns the magazine.”

  “Of course.”

  “And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary interests—”

  “Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests! Don’t you wish there wasn’t any money in the world?”

  “Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it—And I was perfectly willing to do that. I have always kept that in mind as one of my duties to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the magazine was.”

  “Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice. You’ve done it a great deal more than I could, Basil. And it was just the same way with those horrible insurance people.”

  “I know,” March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries or at least to look as if he did not deserve praise, “I know that what Lindau said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a right to punish it. All I say is that he had no right to punish it through me.”

  “Yes?” said Mrs. March askingly.

  “If it had been a question of making Every Other Week the vehicle of Lindau’s peculiar opinions—though they’re not so very peculiar; he might have got the most of them out of Ruskin—I shouldn’t have had any ground to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not.”

  “I don’t see,” Mrs. March interpolated, “how they could hurt it much worse than Colonel Woodburn’s article crying up slavery.”

  “Well,” said March impartially, “we could print a dozen articles praising the slavery it’s impossible to have back, and it wouldn’t hurt us. But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting room would begin to feel it. But that isn’t the point. Lindau’s connection with Every Other Week is almost purely mechanical; he’s merely a translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it isn’t at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an agent to punish him for his opinions. That is what I wouldn’t do; that’s what I never will do.”

  “If you did,” said his wife, “I should perfectly despise you. I didn’t understand how it was before. I thought you were just holding out against Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you and because you wouldn’t recognize his authority. But now I’m with you, Basil, every time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says. But who would have ever supposed he would be so base as to side against you?”

  “I don’t know,” said March thoughtfully, “that we had a right to expect anything else. Fulkerson’s standards are low; they’re merely business standards; and the good that’s in him is incidental and something quite apart from his morals and methods. He’s naturally a generous and right-minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the rest of us.”

  “It hasn’t taught you that, Basil.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Perhaps it’s only that I’m a poor scholar. But I don’t know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night. I could hardly stomach it.”

  His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, “Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn’t have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson.”

  “Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going and to give the old man a chance to say something,” March leniently suggested. “It was a worse effect because he didn’t or couldn’t follow up Fulkerson’s lead.”

  “It was loathsome all the same,” his wife insisted. “It’s the end of Mr. Fulkerson as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I didn’t tell you before,” March resumed
, after a moment, “of my little interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left,” and now he went on to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.

  “I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the old man came up to talk with me and that it was that made him so furious.”

  “Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take! Do you suppose he says such things to his father?”

  “I don’t know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody. I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank.”

  “Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad somehow. He has such a pathetic face. I don’t believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except that night at Mrs. Horn’s when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then he made me feel sadder than ever.”

  “I don’t envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of his. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be as tolerable there for old Lindau himself.”

  “Well, now,” said Mrs. March, “let us put them all out of our minds and see what we are going to do ourselves.”

  They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they should live, in view of March’s severance of his relations with Every Other Week. They had not saved anything from the first year’s salary; they had only prepared to save, and they had nothing solid but their two thousand to count upon. But they built a future in which they easily lived on that and on what March earned with his pen. He became a free lance and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no chains. They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was most distasteful ; they would have returned to their own house if they had not rented it again; but at any rate Mrs. March helped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers. They had some hard struggles, but they succeeded.