A Hazard of New Fortunes

“Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of next week,” said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been sitting astride, with his face to its back, and tilting toward March on its hind-legs, and came and rapped upon his table with his thin bamboo stick. “What you want to do is to get out of the insurance business, anyway. You acknowledge that yourself. You never liked it, and now it makes you sick; in other words, it’s killing you. You ain’t an insurance man by nature. You’re a natural-born literary man, and you’ve been going against the grain. Now, I offer you a chance to go with the grain. I don’t say you’re going to make your everlasting fortune, but I’ll give you a living salary, and if the thing succeeds you’ll share in its success. We’ll all share in its success. That’s the beauty of it. I tell you, March, this is the greatest idea that has been struck since”⁠—Fulkerson stopped and searched his mind for a fit image⁠—“since the creation of man.”

He put his leg up over the corner of March’s table and gave himself a sharp cut on the thigh, and leaned forward to get the full effect of his words upon his listener.

March had his hands clasped together behind his head, and he took one of them down long enough to put his inkstand and mucilage-bottle out of Fulkerson’s way.

“Papa!” she shouted at last, “you’re not listening!”

As soon as possible his wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked, “What is it, Basil?”

“What is what?” he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not avail.

“What is on your mind?”

“How do you know there’s anything?”

“Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing.”

“Don’t I always kiss you when I come in?”

“Not now. I suppose it isn’t necessary anymore. Cela va sans baiser.”

“Yes, I guess it’s so; we get along without the symbolism now.” He stopped, but she knew that he had not finished.

“Is it about your business? Have they done anything more?”

“No; I’m still in the dark. I don’t know whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they ever did. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green’s reduced offer, and decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house. In the shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing at the same table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted her head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effect of her work.

“It’s a mercy the cold weather holds off,” said the mother. “We should have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with a cold house; and I don’t know who would take care of it, or what would become of us, every way.”

“They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn’t cold,” said the girl. “Perhaps they might like a cold one. But it’s too early for cold yet. It’s only just in the beginning of November.”

“The Messenger says they’ve had a sprinkling of snow.”

“Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don’t know when they don’t have sprinklings of snow there. I’m awfully glad we haven’t got that winter before us.”

The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this. “We may have a worse winter here,” she said, darkly.

That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was Christine’s, and the giggling, which was Mela’s, were intershot with the heavier tones of a man’s voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice. His wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face, waiting for him to wake.

“Who is that out there?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

“Indeed, indeed, I don’t know, Jacob,” his wife answered. “I reckon it’s just some visitor of the girls’.”

“Was I snoring?”

“Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did hate to have ’em wake you, and I was just goin’ out to shoo them. They’ve been playin’ something, and that made them laugh.”

“I didn’t know but I had snored,” said the old man, sitting up.

“No,” said his wife. Then she asked, wistfully, “Was you out at the old place, Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“Did it look natural?”

“Yes; mostly. They’re sinking the wells down in the woods pasture.”

“And⁠—the children’s graves?”

“They haven’t touched that part. But I reckon we got to have ’em moved to the cemetery. I bought a lot.”

The old woman began softly to weep. “It does seem too hard that they can’t be let to rest in peace, pore little things. I wanted you and me to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob.

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’s 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’s passion.