第160章 PART FIFTH(35)

Well,I thought there must be something."But this fact had not changed Mrs.March at all in her conviction that it was Mr.Dryfoos's fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him this extraordinary offer,and she reminded him that it had first been made to him,without regard to Fulkerson."And perhaps,"she went on,"Mr.Dryfoos has been changed---softened;and doesn't find money all in all any more.He's had enough to change him,poor old man!""Does anything from without change us?"her husband mused aloud."We're brought up to think so by the novelists,who really have the charge of people's thinking,nowadays.But I doubt it,especially if the thing outside is some great event,something cataclysmal,like this tremendous sorrow of Dryfoos's.""Then what is it that changes us?"demanded his wife,almost angry with him for his heresy.

"Well,it won't do to say,the Holy Spirit indwelling.That would sound like cant at this day.But the old fellows that used to say that had some glimpses of the truth.They knew that it is the still,small voice that the soul heeds,not the deafening blasts of doom.I suppose Ishould have to say that we didn't change at all.We develop.There's the making of several characters in each of us;we are each several characters,and sometimes this character has the lead in us,and sometimes that.From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos,I should say he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet;and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance.The growth in one direction has stopped;it's begun in another;that's all.The man hasn't been changed by his son's death;it stunned,it benumbed him;but it couldn't change him.It was an event,like any other,and it had to happen as much as his being born.It was forecast from the beginning of time,and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world--""Basil!Basil!"cried his wife."This is fatalism!""Then you think,"he said,"that a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of God?"and he laughed provokingly.But he went on more soberly:"I don't know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means good.What did Christ himself say?That if one rose from the dead it would not avail.And yet we are always looking for the miraculous!

I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son,whom he treated cruelly without the final intention of cruelty,for he loved him and wished to be proud of him;but I don't think his death has changed him,any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working through his nature from the beginning.But why do you think he's changed at all?Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on easy terms?

He says himself that he has no further use for the thing;and he knows perfectly well that he couldn't get his money out of it now,without an enormous shrinkage.He couldn't appear at this late day as the owner,and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it's cost him.He can sell it to us for all it's cost him;and four per cent.is no bad interest on his money till we can pay it back.It's a good thing for us;but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good,or whether it's the blessing of Heaven.If it's merely the blessing of Heaven,I don't propose being grateful for it."March laughed again,and his wife said,"It's disgusting.""It's business,"he assented."Business is business;but I don't say it isn't disgusting.Lindau had a low opinion of it.""I think that with all his faults Mr.Dryfoos is a better man than Lindau,"she proclaimed.

"Well,he's certainly able to offer us a better thing in 'Every Other Week,'"said March.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism,and that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the good-fortune opening to them.

XVII.

Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma Leighton,for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary consequence of what he had been,if not what he had done.Afterward he lost this clear vision;he began to deny the fact;he drew upon his knowledge of life,and in arguing himself into a different frame of mind he alleged the case of different people who had done and been much worse things than he,and yet no such disagreeable consequence had befallen them.Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance,and he said to himself that it was this that made him desperate,and willing to call evil his good,and to take his own wherever he could find it.There was a great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry in the mood in which he went to see Christine Dryfoos,the night when the Marches sat talking their prospects over;and nothing that was decided in his purpose.He knew what the drift of his mind was,but he had always preferred to let chance determine his events,and now since chance had played him such an ill turn with Alma,he left it the whole responsibility.Not in terms,but in effect,this was his thought as he walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had practically invited him to resume.He had an insolent satisfaction in having delayed it so long;if he was going back he was going back on his own conditions,and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could make them.But this intention again was inchoate,floating,the stuff of an intention,rather than intention;an expression of temperament chiefly.