“Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?” asked Beaton, after a glance at the book. “Such character—such drama? You won’t.”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” said Fulkerson, “come to get our amateurs warmed up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to speak—get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion of it. I shouldn’t care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial letter and a tailpiece.”
“Couldn’t be done here. We haven’t the touch. We’re good in some things, but this isn’t in our way,” said Beaton, stubbornly. “I can’t think of a man who could do it; that is, among those that would.”
“Well, think of some woman, then,” said Fulkerson, easily. “I’ve got a notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get ’em interested. There ain’t anything so popular as female fiction; why not try female art?”
“The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a good while,” March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton remained solemnly silent.
“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson assented. “But I don’t mean that kind exactly. What we want to do is to work the Ewig-Weibliche in this concern. We want to make a magazine that will go for the women’s fancy every time. I don’t mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously. We’ve got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and get around in the papers that the managers of Every Other Week couldn’t stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it’ll make the fortune of the thing. See?”
He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: “You ought to be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It’s a disgrace to be connected with you.”
“It seems to me,” said Beaton, “that you’d better get a God-gifted girl for your art editor.”
Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a compassionate smile. “My dear boy, they haven’t got the genius of organization. It takes a very masculine man for that—a man who combines the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes and the most ferruginous willpower. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and here he sets!”
The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and Beaton frowned sheepishly. “I suppose you understand this man’s style,” he growled toward March.
“He does, my son,” said Fulkerson. “He knows that I cannot tell a lie.” He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.
“It’s quarter of twelve, and I’ve got an appointment.” Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. “Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, and let us hear from you tomorrow. We hang upon your decision.”
“There’s no deciding to be done,” said Beaton. “You can’t combine the two styles. They’d kill each other.”
“A Dan’el, a Dan’el come to judgment! I knew you could help us out! Take ’em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the Ewig-Weibliche. Dryfoos, I want a word with you.” He led the way into the front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.
VII
March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said: “I hope you will think it worthwhile to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to make a nice thing of the magazine.” He had that timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine. Besides, March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy with him. “We want to make it good; we want to make it high. Fulkerson is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures the way of going about it.”
For answer, Beaton flung out, “I can’t go in for a thing I don’t understand the plan of.”
March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility of Beaton’s. He continued still more deferentially: “Mr. Fulkerson’s notion—I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate experience—is that we shall do best in fiction to confine ourselves to short stories, and make each number complete in itself. He found that the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most people begin with them in fiction; and it’s Mr. Fulkerson’s idea to work unknown
