At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very good
spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress
flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed
them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them;
nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her pretty
little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the
same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she
was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society
fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so
obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his
account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by drawing
upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the experiences
of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period; and he had a
pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the world.
"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if
not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
one met.
She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: "You can meet the
people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It's
what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of their
lives to be met."
"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity? How much
better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"
"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"
"No," said Miss Vance, amused. "Not that I shouldn't like to go."
"What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other
Week,'" said Beaton.
"The staff--'Every Other Week'? What is it?"
"The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the
Dollars." Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of
the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.
Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how
it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was
delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he
had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting
upon having him. "And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken of?"
"'Tutt' altro'! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in
society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement."
"What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity."
"He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and
your name would go into the 'Literary Notes' of all the newspapers."
"Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used!" cried the girl, half horrified
into fancying the situation real.
"Then you'd better not say anything about 'Every Other Week'. Fulkerson
is preternaturally unscrupulous."
March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting
changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater
vividness of effect. One day he came and said: "This thing isn't going to
have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the
first number going for Bevans's novels. Better get Maxwell to do it."
"Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels?"
"So I did; but where the good of 'Every Other Week' is concerned I am a
Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man
to do it. There hasn't been a new magazine started for the last three
years that hasn't had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting
Bevans all to pieces. If people don't see it, they'll think 'Every Other
Week' is some old thing."
March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested,
"Perhaps they'll think it's an old thing if they do see it."
"Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an
assumed name. Or--I forgot! He'll be anonymous under our system, anyway.
Now there ain't a more popular racket for us to work in that first number
than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books and quarrel
over 'em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying,
with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who
like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like Bevans's
things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number, I'd offer
up anybody."
"What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!" said March, with a
laugh.
Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the
novelist. "Say!" he called out, gayly, "what should you think of a paper
defending the late lamented system of slavery'?"
"What do you mean, Fulkerson?" asked March, with a puzzled smile.
Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but
kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward. "There's
an old cock over there at the widow's that's written a book to prove that
slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem. He's a
Southerner."
"I should imagine," March assented.
"He's got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by
the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would
have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer,
in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all
his personal rights by the state. He read the introduction to me last
night. I didn't catch on to all the points--his daughter's an awfully
pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too,
you know--but that's about the gist of it."
"Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?" said March.
"Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, Neigh? Look well on the
title-page."
"Well written?"
"I reckon so; I don't know. The Colonel read it mighty eloquently."
"It mightn't be such bad business," said March, in a muse. "Could you get
me a sight of it without committing yourself?"
"If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another publisher this morning. He
just got it back with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it travelling."
"Well, try it. I've a notion it might be a curious thing."
"Look here, March," said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh
hold; "I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours
for the first number. After all, that's going to be the great card."
"I couldn't, Fulkerson; I couldn't, really. I want to philosophize the
material, and I'm too new to it all yet. I don't want to do merely
superficial sketches."
"Of course! Of course! I understand that. Well, I don't want to hurry
you. Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think we ought to have that
translation in the first number; don't you? We want to give 'em a notion
of what we're going to do in that line."
"Yes," said March; "and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.
I've inquired at Maroni's, and he hasn't been there for several days.
I've some idea perhaps he's sick. But they gave me his address, and I'm
going to see."
"Well, that's right. We want the first number to be the keynote in every
way."
March shook his head. "You can't make it so. The first number is bound to
be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes. It's
invariably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the things you've
seen started. They're experimental, almost amateurish, and necessarily
so, not only because the men that are making them up are comparatively
inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent them to deal
with is more or less consciously tentative. People send their adventurous
things to a new periodical because the whole thing is an adventure. I've
noticed that quality in all the volunteer contributions; it's in the
articles that have been done to order even. No; I've about made up my
mind that if we can get one good striking paper into the first number
that will take people's minds off the others, we shall be doing all we
can possibly hope for. I should like," March added, less seriously, "to
make up three numbers ahead, and publish the third one first."
Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk. "It's a
first-rate idea. Why not do it?"
March laughed. "Fulkerson, I don't believe there's any quackish thing you
wouldn't do in this cause. From time to time I'm thoroughly ashamed of
being connected with such a charlatan."
Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. "Ah, dad burn it! To give that
thing the right kind of start I'd walk up and down Broadway between two
boards, with the title-page of 'Every Other Week' facsimiled on one and my
name and address on the--"