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Georg Ebers - "The Emperor, Part 1, Volume 5."

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "The Toll Gatherer's Day (From Twice Told Tales)"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Time's Portraiture"

Henry Craik - "The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2"

A Hazard of New Fortunes

W >> William Dean Howells >> A Hazard of New Fortunes




"Then that's much better," she said. "I have a kind of superstition in
such matters; I don't like to make a second choice. In a shop I like to
take the first thing of the kind I'm looking for, and even if I choose
further I come back to the original."

"How funny!" said Mela. "Well, now, I'm just the other way. I always take
the last thing, after I've picked over all the rest. My luck always seems
to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, she's more like you. I
believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing
she wants every time."

"I'm like father," said Christine, softened a little by the celebration
of her peculiarity. "He says the reason so many people don't get what
they want is that they don't want it bad enough. Now, when I want a
thing, it seems to me that I want it all through."

"Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela. "That's the way he done
when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he
sold the farm, and that's got some of the best gas-wells on it now that
there is anywhere." She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the
exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face
and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation. Mela
rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, "You've never been in
the natural-gas country, have you?"

"Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!" said Margaret, with a
fervor that was partly, voluntary.

"Would you? Well, we're kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would strike
a stranger."

"I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,"
said Christine. "It seems as if the world was on fire."

"Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun' down in the woods, like it
used to by our spring-house-so still, and never spreadun' any, just like
a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece
off."

They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony
of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to
themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father's
property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they
compared to its advantage with that of New York. They became excited by
Margaret's interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and
envious.

She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should like to see it all!" Then
she made a little pause, and added:

"I'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are over; she never has them after
Lent, but we're to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert
which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists. There
won't be any banjos, I'm afraid, but there'll be some very good singing,
and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother."

She put down her aunt's card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled,
as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you
couldn't get her out for love or money." But she was herself overwhelmed
with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous
way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to
Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.

"Ain't she just as lovely as she can live?" she demanded of her sister
when Margaret was gone.

"I don't know," said Christine. "I guess she wanted to know who Mr.
Beaton had been lending her banjo to."

"Pshaw! Do you suppose she's in love with him?" asked Mela, and then she
broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. "Well, don't
eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I'm goun' to git it out
of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she's somebody. Mrs. Mandel
can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well--or
something. But I guess we appeared about as well as she did. I could see
she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it's gittun' around a little
about father; and when it does I don't believe we shall want for callers.
Say, are you goun'? To that concert of theirs?"

"I don't know. Not till I know who they are first."

"Well, we've got to hump ourselves if we're goun' to find out before
Tuesday."

As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the
miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience. She felt
kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she
hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the
poison of flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such an
attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
leave the rest with Providence.




VIII.

The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
humility. However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their
attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or
moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the
farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest. As it
was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor
of their father's success in making money had blinded them forever to any
possible difference against them. They had no question of themselves in
the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York. They had
been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must
be some mistake.

They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as
the fact of their father's wealth had got around. They had been steadfast
in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they were not only
better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good as any; and
they took Margaret's visit, so far as they, investigated its motive, for
a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of course, a thing
could not get around in New York so quick as it could in a small place.
They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of Mrs. Mandel when
she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted her about going
to Mrs. Horn's musicale. If she had felt any doubt at the name for there
were Horns and Horns--the address on the card put the matter beyond
question; and she tried to make her charges understand what a precious
chance had befallen them. She did not succeed; they had not the premises,
the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid her work in
part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was independent
of money; that though she was positively rich, she was comparatively
poor. Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called because she wished to
be the first to get in with them since it had begun to get around. This
view commended itself to Mela, too, but without warping her from her
opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet for anything. She had
not so vivid a consciousness of her father's money as Christine had; but
she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon its power. She was far
from thinking meanly of any one who thought highly of her for it; that
seemed so natural a result as to be amiable, even admirable; she was
willing that any such person should get all the good there was in such an
attitude toward her.

They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and
mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of
his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
tremor that shook her face from side to side.

After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man's
consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel
about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant
and mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and silently took her
view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money
seemed admirable to him. He had once respected himself for the
hard-headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among
his country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice
of the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County
Agricultural Society. In those days he had served the public with
disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he
might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed
some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift. He
believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
genuine, for some kinds of reading--history, and forensics of an
elementary sort.

With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;
he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their
ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual
encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the
fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good husband. As a good father, he
was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially
the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.
After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow
dealt a horse he turned as if sick. It was a long time before he lifted
himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have
been breached through his affections. He let the girls do as they
pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got
them a piano. It was they who made him sell the farm. If Conrad had only
had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he resented
the want of support he might have found in a less yielding spirit than
his son's.

His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
his farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted the
last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
listlessness. When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself. He
devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship,
which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had already made
without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him; he
began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and in
large sums; for money that had been earned painfully, slowly, and in
little amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The poison of that
ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculators had
instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had succeeded his
somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the proper field
for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New York, whither
the men who have made money and do not yet know that money has made them,
all instinctively turn. He came where he could watch his money breed more
money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the
toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called it speculation,
stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself, mounted with his
luck. He expected, when he had sated his greed, to begin to spend, and he
had formulated an intention to build a great house, to add another to the
palaces of the country-bred millionaires who have come to adorn the great
city. In the mean time he made little account of the things that occupied
his children, except to fret at the ungrateful indifference of his son to
the interests that could alone make a man of him. He did not know whether
his daughters were in society or not; with people coming and going in the
house he would have supposed they must be so, no matter who the people
were; in some vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel,
at so much a year. He never met a superior himself except now and then a
man of twenty or thirty millions to his one or two, and then he felt his
soul creep within him, without a sense of social inferiority; it was a
question of financial inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself
and crawled, it was with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck. Other
men said these many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their
money by sharp practices to which lesser men could not attain; but
Dryfoos believed that he could compass the same ends, by the same means,
with the same chances; he respected their money, not them.

When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,
whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls
by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was
galled.

"Well, anyway," said Mela, "I don't care whether Christine's goon' or
not; I am. And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel."

"Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing
dignity and politeness. "I haven't been asked, you know."

"Then what are we goun' to do?" demanded Mela, almost crossly. She was
physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite
cross. "She might 'a' knowed--well known--we couldn't 'a' come alone, in
New York. I don't see why, we couldn't. I don't call it much of an
invitation."

"I suppose she thought you could come with your mother," Mrs. Mandel
suggested.

"She didn't say anything about mother: Did she, Christine? Or, yes, she
did, too. And I told her she couldn't git mother out. Don't you
remember?"

"I didn't pay much attention," said Christine. "I wasn't certain we
wanted to go."

"I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we cared much," said Mela,
half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine. "Well, I
don't see but what we got to stay at home." She laughed at this lame
conclusion of the matter.

"Perhaps Mr. Conrad--you could very properly take him without an express
invitation--" Mrs. Mandel began.

Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. "I--I don't think I could go that
evening--"

"What's the reason?" his father broke in, harshly. "You're not such a
sheep that you're afraid to go into company with your sisters? Or are you
too good to go with them?"

"If it's to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and
danced that way," said Mrs. Dryfoos, "I don't blame Coonrod for not
wantun' to go. I never saw the beat of it."

Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother. "Well, I wish
Miss Vance could 'a' heard that! Why, mother, did you think it like the
ballet?"

"Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old woman. "I didn't know
what it was like. I hain't never been to one, and you can't be too
keerful where you go, in a place like New York."

"What's the reason you can't go?" Dryfoos ignored the passage between his
wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.

"I have an engagement that night--it's one of our meetings."

"I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night," said Dryfoos. "It
can't be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your
sisters."

"I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures. They depend so much
upon the meetings--"

"I reckon they can stand it for one night," said the old man. He added,
"The poor ye have with you always."

"That's so, Coonrod," said his mother. "It's the Saviour's own words."

"Yes, mother. But they're not meant just as father used them."

"How do you know how they were meant? Or how I used them?" cried the
father. "Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday
night. They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't go with them."

"Pshaw!" said Mela. "We don't want to take Conrad away from his meetun',
do we, Chris?"

"I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine voice. "They could get
along without him for one night, as father says."

"Well, I'm not a-goun' to take him," said Mela. "Now, Mrs. Mandel, just
think out some other way. Say! What's the reason we couldn't get somebody
else to take us just as well? Ain't that rulable?"

"It would be allowable--"

"Allowable, I mean," Mela corrected herself.

"But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family
friend."

"Well, let's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us. He's the oldest family friend
we got."

"I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine, serenely.

"Why, I'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, "Mr. Fulkerson is a very
good young man, and very nice appearun'."

Mela shouted, "He's ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
Christine's!"

Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table
at this sally, but her father said: "Christine is right, Mela. It
wouldn't do for you to go with any other young man. Conrad will go with
you."

"I'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Christine.

"Well, settle that among yourselves. But if you want to go, your brother
will go with you."

"Of course, Coonrod 'll go, if his sisters wants him to," the old woman
pleaded. "I reckon it ain't agoun' to be anything very bad; and if it is,
Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out."

"It will be all right, mother. And I will go, of course."

"There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod. Now, fawther!" This appeal was
to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad's sacrifice.

"You'll always find," he said, "that it's those of your own household
that have the first claim on you."

"That's so, Coonrod," urged his mother. "It's Bible truth. Your fawther
ain't a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible. Search the
Scriptures. That's what it means."

"Laws!" cried Mely, "a body can see, easy enough from mother, where
Conrad's wantun' to be a preacher comes from. I should 'a' thought she'd
'a' wanted to been one herself."

"Let your women keep silence in the churches," said the old woman,
solemnly.

"There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of
the lady ministers nowadays, you'd git yourself into trouble." Mela
looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.




IX.

The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale, in spite of Mrs.
Mandel's advice. Christine made the delay, both because she wished to
show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some
vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of
entertainment. Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this
musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied
disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise
and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them do
for a tardy comer at the theatre.

Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed
her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and
she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's
obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back
of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they
came in. There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the rear
rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and then
looked away again. Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the piece
Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had her
eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right.
Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make
any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none. She glanced with a sort
of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not know
whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him, and
said: "Oh, I am very glad indeed! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met before."
Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and presented
them, and then said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of yours,"
and quickly seated them next the Marches. Mela liked that well enough;
she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all his wife
was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to forbid,
provisionally at least, any such recreation. On her part, Christine was
cool with the Marches. It went through her mind that they must have told
Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of her intimacy.
She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton leaning against the
wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March. Then she conjectured that he
might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with the Marches, and she
bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad, Mela, and Mr. March.
She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her father's, but she was
willing to take them at their apparent social valuation for the time. She
leaned back in her chair, and did not look up at Beaton after the first
furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on her.

The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad
tell her where Miss Vance had met him before. She would not have minded
interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even
Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end
without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.
in society. She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very
few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to
be sociable, they were not very sociable. They were not introduced, for
one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced,
if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she
had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and
either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because
it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an
impression on the young men. In her satisfaction with this, and from her
good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after
the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him. She was at her
ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him,
to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale. It
appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the
rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they
could have it if they wanted it. Her joy was crowned when March modestly
professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish
he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men
dying to do so.

"Oh, pshaw, dyun', yes!" cried Mela, tasting the irony. "I guess I see
them!"

He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she
said, Well, yes, if he thought he could live to get to her; and March
brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old. He
was a contributor to 'Every Other Week,' and so March knew him; he
believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature, and
he now set about studying Mela. He tempted her to express her opinion on
all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and humorous vigor
of her ideas that she was delighted with him. She asked him if he was a
New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him, when he said he had
never been West. She professed herself perfectly sick of New York, and
urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a real live town. He
wondered if it would do to put her into literature just as she was, with
all her slang and brag, but he decided that he would have to subdue her a
great deal: he did not see how he could reconcile the facts of her
conversation with the facts of her appearance: her beauty, her splendor
of dress, her apparent right to be where she was. These things perplexed
him; he was afraid the great American novel, if true, must be incredible.
Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on about New York when they
first came; but she reckoned that Christine was getting so she could put
up with it a little better, now. She looked significantly across the room
to the place where Christine was now talking with Beaton; and the student
of human nature asked, Was she here? and, Would she introduce him? Mela
said she would, the first chance she got; and she added, They would be
much pleased to have him call. She felt herself to be having a beautiful
time, and she got directly upon such intimate terms with the student of
human nature that she laughed with him about some peculiarities of his,
such as his going so far about to ask things he wanted to know from her;
she said she never did believe in beating about the bush much. She had
noticed the same thing in Miss Vance when she came to call that day; and
when the young man owned that he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's
house, she asked him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway,
and where did he suppose she had met her brother? The student of human
nature could not say as to this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest
to treat of the non-society side of her character, her activity in
charity, her special devotion to the work among the poor on the East
Side, which she personally engaged in.