



Produced by David Widger





A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells


PART THIRD


I.

The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series. Instead of the
publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March
whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was
sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts,
and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped
at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the
return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayed
at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would
stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other
plans.

Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not revere him,
March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort
of bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was evoked
by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of
dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense of
whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have had
its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March, to
recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the sap,
at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to have
dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any
advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the
character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that
where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had
expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did
business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put money
into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about other
affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort of
interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. He
had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such
uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson
what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential failure;
and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and the younger
Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not bother him about
it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow who used to
bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind. He alleged it as
another proof of the versatility of the American mind, and of the
grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man grow to his
full size, so that any man in America could run the concern if necessary.
He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's shoes and run the
German Empire at ten days' notice, or about as long as it would take him
to go from New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not know anything about
Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his hand. Fulkerson
himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been up to since