第65章 PART SECOND(31)

Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees,as he said,in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet,though he had his qualms,his questions;and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since Balaam's."We're all asses,of course,"he admitted,in semi-apology to March;"but we're no such asses as Beaton."He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright,its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke.Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give,but it must never happen again.He implored March to promise that it should never happen again;be said their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair.It was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money,but to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous;it must be stopped.These were the expressions of his intimate moods;every front that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty,of devout exultation.His pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with him about it.He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the utmost.He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in the good cause,as he called it.He joined in the applause when a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson's introduction of the topic,and he went on talking that first number into the surviving spectators.He stood treat upon all occasions,and he lunched attaches of the press at all hours.He especially befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of other cities,for,as he explained to March,those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as literary gossip.Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so summarily asked out to lunch,but Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to every exigency,and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that she had been possessed of exclusive information.There was a moment when March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs.March into the advertising department,by means of a tea to these ladies and their friends which she should administer in his apartment,but he did not encourage Fulkerson to be explicit,and the moment passed.Afterward,when he told his wife about it,he was astonished to find that she would not have minded doing it for Fulkerson,and he experienced another proof of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions,and of the personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex.This alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents to write about the first number,but March accused him of sending it to their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke.He said that he would do that or anything else for the good cause,short of marrying the whole circle of female correspondents.

March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too good for the country at large,the more enlightened taste of metropolitan journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York.But first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong.In spite of the quality of the magazine,and in spite of the kindness which so many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson,the notices in the New York papers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor.A merit in the work was acknowledged,and certain defects in it for which March had trembled were ignored;but the critics astonished him by selecting for censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed;which being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults.He owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it,he could have agreed with them,but that to say thus and so was preposterous;and that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous recognition of the claims of the different papers,he should have known the counting-room was at the bottom of it.As it was,he could only attribute it to perversity or stupidity.It was certainly stupid to condemn a magazine novelty like 'Every Other Week'for being novel;and to augur that if it failed,it would fail through its departure from the lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built,was in the last degree perverse,and it looked malicious.The fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against it,since it would invade no other field;it would prosper on no ground but its own.

XIV.

The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had not,however,attacked the literary quality of the number)the more bitterly he resented it;and his wife's indignation superheated his own.

'Every Other Week'had become a very personal affair with the whole family;the children shared their parents'disgust;Belle was outspoken in,her denunciations of a venal press.Mrs.March saw nothing but ruin ahead,and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston,and an establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year.She shed some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must involve;but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of the publication day,she nobly told him that if the worst came to the worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him,and should not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.

"Oh,hold on,hold on!"he protested."You don't think we've made a failure,do you?""Why,of course,"she faltered,while March remained gloomily silent.

"Well,I guess we'll wait for the official count,first.Even New York hasn't gone against us,and I guess there's a majority coming down to Harlem River that could sweep everything before it,anyway.""What do you mean,Fulkerson?"March demanded,sternly.