The March Family Trilogy, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> The March Family Trilogy, Complete





III.

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated
roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the
city as some violent invasion of others' lives might afford in human
nature. Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them, they
went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city pushing
its way by irregular advances into the country. Some spaces, probably
held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others
providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left vacant
comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter points.
It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park, springing up in
isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity between, and here
and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines with
the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city foundations. But wherever
it went or wherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp; and the
adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street
inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops
and shoppers. The butchers' shops and milliners' shops on the avenue
might as well have been at Tenth as at One Hundredth Street.

The adventurers were not often so adventurous. They recognized that in
their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let
speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young. Their
point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York
remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy,
ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main
difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only
regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a
sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or
critical attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering
deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some
knowledge of the forces at work-forces of pity, of destruction, of
perdition, of salvation. He wandered about on Sunday not only through the
streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him, and
listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of economics as
well as a religion. He could not get his wife to go with him; she
listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all seemed
fantastic and menacing. She lamented the literary peace, the intellectual
refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he owned it was
very pretty, but he said it was not life--it was death-in-life. She liked
to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-denunciation, but she
asked him, "Which of your prophets are you going to follow?" and he
answered: "All-all! And a fresh one every Sunday." And so they got their
laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at heart, and with a dim
consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in
life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his
strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship. On its social
side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's radiant
sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it. Most of
the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New
York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable
time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators,
he rarely saw any of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him
from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
whistled almost uninterruptedly. When any one came, March found himself
embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors were usually young men,
terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions
chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something
like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his
sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling,
and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really
thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were
necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere
acceptants of older men's thoughts and feelings, whether they were
tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as
others were. Certain of them called themselves realists, certain
romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what
romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of
material. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the
aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work
or not; but this was not an easy matter. Those who were at all
interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or
three experiments with the bashfuller sort--those who had come up to the
metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary
tradition--he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was
young like them. He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet he
had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his wife
encouraged:

Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at
first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of 'Every Other
Week'; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out
of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'hote dinner, or the
audiences at the theatres. March's devotion to his work made him
reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the
question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man's base
willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere. He asked his
wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in
a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to
entertain this notion. But when it came to the point she would not go; he
offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him. She said she
knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could take
it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be
persuaded. She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with
Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a
week or two to the seashore near Boston--the only real seashore--in
August. The excursions were practically confined to a single day at Coney
Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the seashore
near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an editorial
exigency kept March at the last moment. The Boston streets seemed very
queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings little; in
the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother with a
down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty. She knew that this
was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which
people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she
sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New
York should have made her afraid of it. The sky seemed cold and gray; the
east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut her
to the heart. She took her children up to the South End, and in the
pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated
home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows. The tenants must have
been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure,
though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the
house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend
a desire for something she wished to take away. She knew she could not
bear it now; and the children did not seem eager. She did not push on to
the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad
to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and
hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made
its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.

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 back yard. 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 any one 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. Do you know, 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's 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 some time 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 lovemaking 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 quarrelled 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
farm work 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's,
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 hurt 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 himself 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
shipshape. 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.