“Ah, you don’t get the idea!” said Fulkerson. “What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the fact.”
“Am I going to come in anywhere?” the old man interrupted.
“You’re going to come in at the head of the procession! We are going to strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing. I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We have had all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the sympathies of the American public the first round. I feel,” said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, “that Every Other Week is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it’s supposed to be my enterprise, my idea. As far as I’m known at all, I’m known simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I’ve got the money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that impression, sooner or later, if we don’t give them something else to work up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that you’re in it, with your untold millions—that, in fact, it was your idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who’s always had these theories of cooperation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our struggling young writers and artists—”
March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson’s self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when Conrad broke out: “Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that. It would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and—and what I think—what I wish to do—that is something I will not let anyone put me in a false position about. No!” The blood rushed into the young man’s gentle face, and he met his father’s glance with defiance.
Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking, and Fulkerson said, caressingly: “Why, of course, Coonrod! I know how you feel, and I shouldn’t let anything of that sort go out uncontradicted afterward. But there isn’t anything in these times that would give us better standing with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things. The public expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more than to be told that the success of Every Other Week sprang from the first application of the principle of Live and let Live to a literary enterprise. It would look particularly well, coming from you and your father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you approve of the principle I don’t see why you need object. The main thing is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country, and that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son. I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father, and supply it gratis with the paragraphs.”
“I guess,” said the old man, “we will get along without the cut.”
Fulkerson laughed. “Well, well! Have it your own way. But the sight of your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and breadth of this fair land.”
“There was a fellow,” Dryfoos explained, in an aside to March, “that was getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel engraving of me in. He said a good many prominent citizens were going to have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him I couldn’t let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it cash. You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him that I expected him to pay the two hundred.”
Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke. “Well, sir, I guess Every Other Week will pay you that much. But if you won’t sell at any price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your countenance on the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet.”
“I don’t seem to feel very hungry, yet,” said the old man, dryly.
“Oh, l’appétit vient en mangeant, as our French friends say. You’ll be hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam. It’s too late for oysters.”
“Doesn’t that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back, sometime in October,” March suggested.
“No, no!” said Fulkerson, “you don’t catch on to the business end of this thing, my friends. You’re proceeding on something like the old exploded idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he’s watched the course of modern events, that it’s just as apt to be the other way. I contend that we’ve got a real substantial success to celebrate now; but even if we hadn’t, the celebration would do more than anything else to create the success, if we got it
