A Fortnight of Folly. Maurice Thompson
there a member of the French institute by the name of Dufour?” inquired R. Hobbs Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his heavy brows.
“I am sure not,” said Hartley Crane, “for I met most of the members when I was last at Paris and I do not recall the name.”
“There goes that Bourbon again,” muttered Laurens Peck, the critic; “if one should mention Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal acquaintance with him!”
It was plain enough that Peck did not value Crane very highly, and Crane certainly treated Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was blissfully unaware that she was the cause of this trouble, and for that matter the men themselves would have denied with indignant fervor any thing of the kind. Both of them were stalwart and rather handsome, the Kentuckian dark and passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool and willful in appearance. Miss Moyne had been pleased with them both, without a special thought of either, whilst they were going rapidly into the worry and rapture of love, with no care for anybody but her.
She was beautiful and good, sweet-voiced, gentle, more inclined to listen than to talk, and so she captivated everybody from the first.
“I think it would be quite interesting,” she said, “if it should turn out that Mr. Dufour is a genuine foreign author, like Tolstoï or Daudet or——”
“Realists, and nobody but realists,” interposed Mrs. Philpot; “why don’t you say Zola, and have done with it?”
“Well, Zola, then, if it must be,” Miss Moyne responded; “for, barring my American breeding and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in sympathy with—no, not that exactly, but we are so timid. I should like to feel a change in the literary air.”
“Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in his critical papers. He’s all the time trying to prove that fiction is truth and that truth is fiction. He lauds Zola’s and Dostoieffsky’s filthy novels to the skies; but in his own novels he’s as prudish and Puritanish as if he had been born on Plymouth Rock instead of on an Illinois prairie.”
“I wonder why he is not a guest here,” some one remarked. “I should have thought that our landlord would have had him at all hazards. Just now Selby is monopolizing the field of American fiction. In fact I think he claims the earth.”
“It is so easy to assume,” said Guilford Ferris, whose romances always commanded eulogy from the press, but invariably fell dead on the market; “but I am told that Selby makes almost nothing from the sales of his books.”
“But the magazines pay him handsomely,” said Miss Moyne.
“Yes, they do,” replied Ferris, pulling his long brown mustache reflectively, “and I can’t see why. He really is not popular; there is no enthusiasm for his fiction.”
“It’s a mere vogue, begotten by the critics,” said Hartley Crane. “Criticism is at a very low ebb in America. Our critics are all either ignorant or given over to putting on English and French airs.”
Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and glanced at Peck who, however, did not appear to notice the remark.
“There’s a set of them in Boston and New York,” Crane went on, “who watch the Revue de Deux Mondes and the London Atheneum, ready to take the cue from them. Even American books must stand or fall by the turn of the foreign thumb.”
“That is a very ancient grumble,” said Ferris, in a tone indicative of impartial indifference.
“Take these crude, loose, awkward, almost obscene Russian novels,” continued Crane, “and see what a furor the critics of New York and Boston have fermented in their behalf, all because it chanced that a coterie of Parisian literary roués fancied the filthy imaginings of Dostoieffsky and the raw vulgarity of Tolstoï. What would they say of you, Ferris, if you should write so low and dirty a story as Crime and Its Punishment by Dostoieffsky?”
“Oh, I don’t know, and, begging your grace, I don’t care a straw,” Ferris replied; “the publishers would steal all my profits in any event.”
“Do you really believe that?” inquired Peck.
“Believe it? I know it,” said Ferris. “When did you ever know of a publisher advertising a book as in its fiftieth thousand so long as the author had any royalty on the sales? The only book of mine that ever had a run was one I sold outright in the manuscript to George Dunkirk & Co., who publish all my works. That puerile effort is now in its ninetieth thousand, while the best of the other six has not yet shown up two thousand! Do you catch the point?”
“But what difference can printing a statement of the books sold make, anyway?” innocently inquired Miss Moyne.
Ferris laughed.
“All the difference in the world,” he said; “the publisher would have to account to the author for all those thousands, don’t you see.”
“But they have to account, anyhow,” replied Miss Moyne, with a perplexed smile.
“Account!” exclaimed Ferris, contemptuously; “account! yes, they have to account.”
“But they account to me,” Miss Moyne gently insisted.
“Who are your publishers?” he demanded.
“George Dunkirk & Co.,” was the answer.
“Well,” said he, “I’ll wager you anything I can come within twenty of guessing the sales up to date of your book. It has sold just eleven hundred and forty copies.”
She laughed merrily and betrayed the dangerous closeness of his guess by coloring a little.
“Oh, its invariably just eleven hundred and forty copies, no matter what kind of a book it is, or what publisher has it,” he continued; “I’ve investigated and have settled the matter.”
The historian was suddenly thoughtful, little Mrs. Philpot appeared to be making some abstruse calculation, Crane was silently gazing at the ground and Peck, with grim humor in his small eyes, remarked that eleven hundred and forty was a pretty high average upon the whole.
Just at this point a figure appeared in the little roadway where it made its last turn lapsing from the wood toward the hotel. A rather tall, slender and angular young woman, bearing a red leather bag in one hand and a blue silk umbrella in the other, strode forward with the pace of a tragedienne. She wore a bright silk dress, leaf-green in color, and a black bonnet, of nearly the Salvation Army pattern, was set far back on her head, giving full play to a mass of short, fine, loosely tumbled yellow hair.
She was very much out of breath from her walk up the mountain, but there was a plucky smile on her rather sallow face and an enterprising gleam in her light eyes.
She walked right into the hotel, as if she had always lived there, and they heard her talking volubly to the servant as she was following him to a room.
Everybody felt a waft of free Western air and knew that Hotel Helicon had received another interesting guest, original if not typical, with qualities that soon must make themselves respected in a degree.
“Walked from the station?” Mrs. Philpot ventured, in querulous, though kindly interrogation.
“Up the mountain?” Miss Moyne added, with a deprecatory inflection.
“And carried that bag!” exclaimed all the rest.
V
Gaspard Dufour, whose accumulations of adipose tissue appeared to serve him a good turn, as he descended the steep, rocky ravine, hummed a droll tune which was broken at intervals by sundry missteps and down-sittings and side-wise bumps against the jutting crags. He perspired freely,