"Can you prove that?" His father turned sharply upon him. "Whatever is
won is lost. It's all a game; it don't make any difference what you bet
on. Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his
eyes open."
"Ah, but the glory!" Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage. "I
hadn't got to the glory yet, because it's hard to estimate it; but put
the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the
twenty-five thousand, and you've got an annual income from 'Every Other
Week' of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track,
from this office to the moon. I don't mention any of the sister planets
because I like to keep within bounds."
Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson's fooling, and
said, "That's what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson--you always keep
within bounds."
"Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here. More
sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don't deny it,"
said Fulkerson. "And I do hate to have a thing overstated."
"And the glory--you do really think there's something in the glory that
pays?"
"Not a doubt of it! I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money,"
said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for
the glory along with it."
"And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along
with it?"
"Well, sir, I'm happy to say we haven't come to that yet."
"Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor,
"would rather have the glory alone. I believe he don't even care much for
your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson."
Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad's face and then
March's, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which
would enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning. He apparently resolved
to launch himself upon conjecture. "Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels
about the things of this world, anyway. I should like to take 'em on the
plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago
that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up my mind that I
would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks doing here below.
And I can't see but what Conrad runs the thing on business principles in
his department, and I guess you'll find it so if you look into it. I
consider that we're a whole team and big dog under the wagon with you to
draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the literary
business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do the heavy lying
in the advertising part. Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I 'most
forgot Beaton--Hamlet with Hamlet left out."
Dryfoos looked across at his son. "Wasn't that the fellow's name that was
there last night?"
"Yes," said Conrad.
The old man rose. "Well, I reckon I got to be going. You ready to go
up-town, Conrad?"
"Well, not quite yet, father."
The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his
son.
Fulkerson remained.
"He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
Fulkerson," said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.
Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, "Didn't he say
anything to you before I came in?"
"Not a word."
"Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed Fulkerson, "but I guess
he's been having a talk with Conrad that's soured on him. I reckon maybe
he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this
world, and Conrad's showed himself just as set against it as ever."
"It might have been that," March admitted, pensively. "I fancied
something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop."
Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:
"That's it, then; and it's all right. Conrad 'll come round in time; and
all we've got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does. I
know he likes you." Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and
looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.
"He dissembled his love," he said; but afterward, in describing to his
wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.
When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage
him. "He's just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know how to
express himself. You may be perfectly sure that he's delighted with the
success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that
he owes it all to you."
"Ah, I'm not so sure. I don't believe a man's any better for having made
money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he's any
wiser. I don't know just the point he's reached in his evolution from
grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it's gone the process must
have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he's
come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that
intellectual ability is among them--what we call intellectual ability. He
must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous
instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental
make-up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned
into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's
the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not very
proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and
ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being
mine, once."
"No, dear, they never did," his wife protested.
"Well, they're not likely to be in the future. The Dryfoos feature of
'Every Other Week' is thoroughly distasteful to me."
"Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond
furnishing the money?"
"That's the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get. But the man
that holds the purse holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but
when he likes he can drive. If we don't like his driving, then we can get
down."
Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the
personal aspects involved. "Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived
you?"
"Oh no!" said her husband, laughing. "But I think he has deceived
himself, perhaps."
"How?" she pursued.
"He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him,
and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much
so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of
proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether
you've got it till you try."
"Nonsense! Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?"
"I hope he may not be tempted. But I'd rather be taking the chances with
Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos
seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing."
Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began, "Well, my dear, I
never wanted to come to New York--"
"Neither did I," March promptly put in.
"But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm not going to have you
letting every little thing discourage you. I don't see what there was in
Mr. Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety. He's just a common, stupid,
inarticulate country person, and he didn't know how to express himself,
as I said in the beginning, and that's the reason he didn't say
anything."
"Well, I don't deny you're right about it."
"It's dreadful," his wife continued, "to be mixed up with such a man and
his family, but I don't believe he'll ever meddle with your management,
and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as
possible, and go quietly on your own way."
"Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March. "I hope I sha'n't begin
going stealthily."
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, "just let me know when you're tempted
to do that. If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or
your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce
you."
"In view of that I'm rather glad the management of 'Every Other Week'
involves tastes and not convictions," said March.