Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to
their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their
married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she
considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning
in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his
absent-minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him
there. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer
boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing
seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at
table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and
invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her so
often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in
regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters cited
and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his mind
and respect for his character. She often said that if he would only bring
these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she had
long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron
code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native
lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do as
he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in
holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering
keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently
till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks
in the irreparable. She would almost admit at moments that what he had
done was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full
force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act of
independent volition in witness and warning against him. Their mass
oppressed but never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong thing when
left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection
of his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of
comedy in it all, and some tragedy.
He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will
imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion
from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor
Green's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a
strange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk than
anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other
places in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next day in
hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an
elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take less
than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was able, in
the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for the
apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the background
of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether more
suitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished
house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Green
apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far up-town, so as to
be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would be
as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is
hard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again,
may best be left to the marital imagination.
He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk,
and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly,
and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, like
all the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion to his
insincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not mean to
take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his inspection
of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he
put on an air of offended dignity. "If you don't wish to show the
apartment," he said, "I don't care to see it."
The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. He
scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry for
him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give
him at parting. At the same time, he had to trump up an objection to the
flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and
he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.
"It's light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you make out ten
rooms."
"There's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no proof.
March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out of
the door without another word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible,
to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected, with shame,
that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.
He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and
convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only
thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New
York.
Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March the
curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:
"Look here! Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon? She's
been at the agents again, and they've been at me. She likes your look--or
Mrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount from
the original price. I'm authorized to say you can have it for one
seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you to
offer one fifty."
March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his
corrupt acquiescence. "It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze into
it."
"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted. "How many rooms do you people
want?"
"I've got to have a place to work--"
"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office."
"I hadn't thought of that," March began. "I suppose I could do my work at
the office, as there's not much writing--"
"Why, of course you can't do your work at home. You just come round with
me now, and look at that again."
"No; I can't do it."
"Why?"
"I--I've got to dine."
"All right," said Fulkerson. "Dine with me. I want to take you round to a
little Italian place that I know."
One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simple
matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the
self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process is
probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of
result is unimportant; the process is everything.
Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of
a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant
of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern
of the lower middle-class New York home. There were the corroded
brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with
its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed
for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about
with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a
single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and,
exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back
parlor. He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth
before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a
napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried
fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl
and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at such
places.
"Ah, this is nice!" said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable
napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he
described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they
should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place,
and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least, several
were Hebrews and Cubans. "You get a pretty good slice of New York here,"
he said, "all except the frosting on top. That you won't find much at
Maroni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean the ladies ever, of
course." The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking people
enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and, except in
a few instances, not Americans. "It's like cutting straight down through
a fruitcake," Fulkerson went on, "or a mince-pie, when you don't know who
made the pie; you get a little of everything." He ordered a small flask
of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket.
March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed.
"Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and he
thought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bottle they used to have it
in at the country drug-stores."
"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it," said March. "How far
back that goes! Who's Dryfoos?"
"Dryfoos?" Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard of
French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of
butter, and fed it into himself. "Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I call
him old, but he ain't so very. About fifty, or along there."
"No," said March, "that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be."
"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway," said Fulkerson,
thoughtfully. "And I've been wondering just how I should tell you. Can't
always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever been
out in the natural-gas country?"
"No," said March. "I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I've
never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always
preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through
Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it as
much as we do."
"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson. "Well, the natural-gas country is worth
seeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio
and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas
region that they've been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country.
If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea
how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all
full of stumps?"
"I should think so."
"Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt
is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. You
know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a
stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they
just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug
and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas. I
rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting
time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece of
ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away
like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any
more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either.
Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are
places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was
settled.
"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come in
smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't odorless, like the
Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--about
as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikes
you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good
warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight. That's in the
suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farm
business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, and
all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive up
from the depot you think everybody's moving. Everything seems to be piled
into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere.
You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our
section--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot
of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher
than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to
the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four
churches. Well, they're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has
struck it hard, and they've got a lot of new buildings that needn't be
ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St.
Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art.
You can't buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot
in New York--or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the place just
when the boom was in its prime. I went out there to work the newspapers
in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real
bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms
and showed me everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful,
too! To see a whole community stirred up like that was--just like a big
boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future;
nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed your
blood. Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a
nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together,
instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take
the hindmost. They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted
their town to grow they'd got to keep their gas public property. So they
extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole
gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well
that was put down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that's a mind
to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gas
he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gas
you want to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to it
for themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole
community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of
splitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied
citizens. See that fellow?" Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a
twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the
door. "They say that fellow's a Socialist. I think it's a shame they're
allowed to come here. If they don't like the way we manage our affairs
let 'em stay at home," Fulkerson continued. "They do a lot of mischief,
shooting off their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all
that; but I'd like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw
one another to death. We don't want any of their poison."
March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with a
teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who
had just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans, and
yet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard and
mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in
the gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and
chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the
Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage was
erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left
hand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found time
to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right hand.
"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and
showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hear
them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why,
when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped it
into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of
the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when they let
one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how
to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass
stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter. I don't
know whether it's so or not. But I can believe anything of natural gas.
My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well
and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the way they light it--and a
plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red
and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the
ground under your feet! You felt like saying:
"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt.'
We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's where I met
old Dryfoos."
"Oh yes!--Dryfoos," said March. He observed that the waiter had brought
the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.
"Yes," Fulkerson laughed. "We've got round to Dryfoos again. I thought I
could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story
long. If you're not in a hurry, though--"
"Not in the least. Go on as long as you like."
"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator, of
course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and
public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about
him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four
miles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life;
father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the right
stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those
Pennsylvania Dutch. He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm
anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in
some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the
papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his
ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it
was a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated it
awfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the weekly
newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and throw cold
water on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him sick to hear
the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that stirred up
the neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he'd hear of a man
that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to sell out
and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and try to talk him out of
it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last him
to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try to
make him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard owned the
whole region.
"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a man's offered a big
price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary from
the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of the
other fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of his own
family even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and did
was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But the
young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away to
school. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't be spared
from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but they
contrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too. So when
a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred
thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He'd 'a' liked to 'a'
kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanity
wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the girls
outvoted him. They just made him sell.
"He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was off in some
piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house on
it, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in
Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money. Just
what he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. Well, they
say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn't anything to
do. He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in his
office and ask him what he should do. 'I hain't got any horses, I hain't
got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens. I hain't
got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.' The fellow said the tears
used to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been so busy
himself he believed he should 'a' cried, too. But most o' people thought
old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more for his
farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a hundred
and fifty thousand. People couldn't believe he was just homesick and
heartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't asked
more; that's human nature, too.
"After a while something happened. That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos
to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and live
in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and he
kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on. He
came into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty
acres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so-well,
and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished.
He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of
the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when I
struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos &
Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and he drove me
out there himself. Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven
through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and
houses put up--regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass--all at
once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made;
said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then they
intended to push things."
Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and
then went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up
about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of
strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money in
it. He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped
speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four
hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round
numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it
comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he came on
to New York."
Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup
that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette,
which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,
as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant
to tell without prompting.