Chapter V: Part 5

“To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion, that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we’re intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they’re intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But let’s go out to dinner this evening and talk it over.”

They dined together at Mouquin’s every night for a week. At the end of that time Vroom, still sarcastic and grumbling, was a convert. And a great accession Howard found him. He had sound judgment as to the value of news-items--what demanded first page, the “show-window,” because it would interest everybody; what was worth a line on an inside page because it would interest only a few thousands. He was the most skillful of the _News-Record’s_ many good writers of headlines, a master of that, for the newspaper, art of arts--condensed and interesting statement, alluring the glancing reader to read on. Also he had an eye for effects with type. “You make every page a picture,” Howard said to him. “It is wonderful how you balance your headlines, emphasising the important news yet saving the minor items from obscurity. I should like to see the paper you would make if you had the right sort of illustrations to put in.”

Vroom was amazed at himself. He who had opposed any “head” which broke the column rule was now so far degenerated into a “yellow journalist” that, when Howard spoke of illustrations, he actually longed to test his skill at distributing them effectively.

* * * * *

Two months of hard work, tedious, because necessarily so indirect, produced a newspaper which was “on the right lines,” as Howard understood right lines. And he felt that the time had come to make the necessary radical changes in the editorial page.

The _News-Record_ had long posed as independent because it supported now one political party and now the other, or divided its support. But this superficial independence was in reality subservience to the financial interests of the two principal owners. They made their newspaper assail Republican or Democratic corruption and misgovernment in city, state or nation, according as their personal interests lay. They used the editorial page and, to even better advantage, the news-columns, in revenging themselves for too heavy levies of blackmail upon their corrupt interests or in securing unjust legislation and privileges.

Obedient and cynical Mr. Malcolm had made the editorial page corrupt and brilliant--never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal friends--the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering the poisoned arrows of raillery and satire. Again he was the plain-spoken friend of the cause and warned its honest supporters against these “fool friends” whom he pretended to regard as its leaders. Again he played the part of a blind enthusiast and praised folly as wisdom and urged it on to more damaging activities.

“We abhor humbug here,” he used to say; and perhaps he did in a measure excuse himself to his conscience with the phrase. But in fact his editorial page was usually a succession of humbugs, of brilliant hypocrisies and cheats perpetrated under the guise of exposing humbug.

Just as Howard was ready to reverse Malcolm’s editorial programme, New York was seized with one of its “periodic spasms of virtue.” The city government was, as usual, in the hands of the two bosses who owned the two political machines. One was taking the responsibility and the larger share of the spoils; the other was maintaining him in power and getting the smaller but a satisfactory share. The alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the “purification” of the city.

Every man of sense knowing human nature and the conditions of city life knew that this plan was foredoomed to ridiculous failure, and that the event would be a popular revulsion against “reform.”

“Why not speak the truth about these vice-hunters?” Howard was discussing the situation with three of his editorial writers--Segur, Huntington and Montgomery.

“It’s mighty dangerous,” Montgomery objected. “You will be sticking knives into a sacred Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.”

“Yes, we’ll have all the good people about our ears,” said Segur. “We’ll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They’ll thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing accounts of the ‘exposure’ of the dives and dens.”

“That’s good. I hope we shall,” said Howard cheerfully. “It will advertise us tremendously.”

The three were better pleased than they would have admitted to themselves by the seeming certainty of Howard’s impending undoing.

“No, gentlemen,” Howard said, as they were about to go to their rooms for the day’s work. “There’s no danger in attacking any hypocrisy. Don’t attack beliefs that are universal or nearly universal--at least not openly. But don’t be afraid of a hypocrisy because it is universal. People know that they are hypocrites in respect of it. They may not have the courage publicly to applaud you. But they’ll be privately delighted and will admire your courage. We’ll try to be discreet and we’ll be careful to be truthful. And we’ll begin by making these gentlemen show themselves up.”

The next morning the _News-Record_ published a double-leaded editorial. It described the importance of improving political and social conditions in New York; it went on to note the distinguished names on the committee for the destruction of vice; it closed with the announcement that on the following day the _News-Record_ would publish the views of these eminent reformers upon conditions and remedies.

The next day he printed the interviews--a collection of curiosities in utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard’s theory of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews. By adroit quotations, by contrasting one with another, he showed, or rather made the so-called reformers themselves show, that where they were sincere they were in the main silly, and where they were plausible they were in the main insincere; that every man of them had his own pet scheme for the salvation of wicked New York; and that they could not possibly accomplish anything more valuable than leading the people on the familiar, aimless, demoralizing excursion through the slums.

On the following day he frankly laughed at them as a lot of impracticables who either did not know the patent facts of city life or refused to admit those facts. And he turned his attention to the real problem, a respectable administration for the city--a practical end which could easily be accomplished by practical action. From day to day he kept this up, publishing a splendid series of articles, humorous, witty, satirical, eloquent, bold, with a dominant strain of sincerity and plain common sense. As his associates had predicted, a storm gathered and burst in fury about the _News-Record_. It was denounced by “leading citizens,” including many of the clergy. Its “esteemed” contemporaries published and endorsed and amplified the abuse. And its circulation went up at the rate of five thousand a day.

When the storm was at its height, when the whole town seemed to be agreeing with the angry reformers but was quietly laughing at their folly and hypocrisy, Howard threw his bomb. On a Saturday morning he gave half of his first page with big but severely impartial headlines to an analysis of the members of the vice committee--a broadside of facts often hinted but never before verified and published. First came those who owned property and sub-let it for vicious purposes, the property and purpose specified in detail; then those who were directors in corporations which had got corrupt privileges from the local boss, the privileges being carefully specified, and also the amounts of which they had robbed the city. Last came those who were directors in corporations which had bought from the State-boss injustices and licenses to rob, the specifications given in damning detail.

His leading editorial was entitled “Why We Don’t Have Decent Government.” It was powerful in its simplicity, its merciless raillery and irony; and only at the very end did it contain passion. There, in a few eloquent sentences he arraigned these professed reformers who were growing rich through the boss-system, who were trafficking with the bosses and were now engaged in wrecking the hopes of honesty and decency. On that day the _News-Record’s_ circulation went up thirty thousand. The town rang with its “exposure” and the attention of the whole country was arrested. It was one of the historic “beats” of New York journalism. The reputation of the _News-Record_ for fearlessness and truth-telling and news-enterprise was established. At abound it had become the most conspicuous and one of the most powerful journals in New York.

XVI.

MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS.

Howard, riding in the Park one morning late in the spring, came upon Mrs. Carnarvon. She gave him no chance to evade her, but joined him and accommodated her horse’s pace to his.

“And are you still on the _News-Record?_” she said. “I hope not.”

“Why?” Howard was smiling, glad to get an outside view of what he had been doing.

“Because it’s become so sensational. It used to be such a nice paper. And now--gracious, what headlines! What attacks on the very best people in the town!”

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” laughed Howard. “We’ve become so depraved that we are actually telling the truth about somebodies instead of only about nobodies.”

“I might have known that you would sympathise with that sort of thing.” Mrs. Carnarvon was teasing, yet reproachful. “You always were an anarchist.”

“Is it anarchistic to be no respecter of persons and to put big headlines over big items and little headlines over little items?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. You are encouraging the unruly classes.”

“Dear me! And we thought we were fighting the unruly class. We thought that it was our friends--or rather, your friends--the franchise grabbers and legislature-buyers who won’t obey the laws unless the laws happen to suit their convenience. They’re the only unruly class I know anything about. I’ve heard of another kind but I’ve never been able to find it. And I never hear much about it except when a lot of big rascals are making off weighted down with plunder. They always shout back over their shoulders: ‘Don’t raise a disturbance or you’ll arouse the unruly classes.’”

Mrs. Carnarvon was laughing. “You put it well,” she said, “and I’m not clever enough to answer you. But they all tell me the _News-Record_ has become a dangerous paper, that it’s attacking everybody who has anything.”

“Anything he has stolen, yes. But that’s all.”

“You can’t get me to sympathise with you. I like well-dressed, well-mannered people who speak good English.”

“So do I. That’s why I’m doing all in my power to improve the conditions for making more and more people of the sort one likes to talk to and dine with.”

“Why, I thought you sympathised with the lower classes.”

“Not a bit of it. Who has been maligning me to you? I abhor the lower classes--so much so that I wish to see them abolished.”

“Well, you’ll have to blame Marian for misleading me.”

“Miss Trevor? How is she?” Mrs. Carnarvon was looking closely at him, and he was not sure that he succeeded in showing nothing more than friendly interest.

“Haven’t you heard from her? She’s in England, visiting in Lancashire. You know her cousin married Lord Cranmore.”

“I saw in the papers several months ago that she was going abroad. I haven’t heard a word since.”

Mrs. Carnarvon started to say something, but changed her mind.

“When is she coming home?”

“Not until July. You must come to see us at Newport.”

“Nothing could please me better--if I can get away.”

“I’ll send you an invitation, although you have treated me very badly of late. But I suppose you are busy.”

“Busy? Isn’t a galley slave always busy?”

“Are you still writing editorials?”

“Yes--and on the fallen _News-Record_. In fact----”

“Well--what?”

Howard laughed. “Don’t faint,” he said. “I’ll leave you at once if you wish me to, and I’ll never give it away that you once knew me. I’m the editor--the responsible devil for the depravity.”

“How interesting!” Mrs. Carnarvon was evidently not disturbed. Then the American adoration of success came out. “I’m so glad you’re getting on. I always knew you would. Really, you must come to dinner. I’ll invite some of the people you’ve been attacking. They’ll like to look at you, and you will be amused by them. And I don’t in the least mind your giving it to them if they bait you, as I did this morning. Will you come?”

“If I may leave by ten o’clock. I go down town every night.”

“Why, when do you sleep?”

“Not much, these days. Life’s too interesting to permit of much sleep. I’ll make up when it slackens a bit.”

As he was turning his horse, she said: “Marian’s address is Claridge’s, Brooke Street, Mayfair. If she isn’t there, they forward her mail.”

Howard was puzzled. “What made her give me that address?” he thought. “I know she didn’t like my seeing so much of Marian. And here she is practically inviting me to write to her.” He could not understand it. “If I were not a ‘yellow’ editor and if Marian were not engaged to one of the richest men in New York, I’d say that this lady was encouraging me.” He smiled. “Not yet--not just yet.” And he cheerfully urged his horse into a canter.

Mrs. Carnarvon’s opinion of the _News-Record_ and its recent performances fairly represented that of the fashionable and the very rich. They read it, as they never did before, because it interested them. They could not deny that what it said was true; that is, they could not deny it to their own minds, although they did vigorously deny it publicly. Those who were attacked directly or indirectly, or expected to be attacked, denounced the paper as an “outrage,” a “disgrace to the city,” a “specimen of the journalism of the gutter.” Many who were not in sympathy with the men or the methods assailed thought that its course was “inexpedient,” “tended to increase discontent among the lower classes,” “weakened the influence of the better classes.” Only a few of the “triumphant classes” saw the real value and benefit of the _News-Record’s_ frank attacks upon greed and hypocrisy, saw that these attacks were not dangerous or demagogical because they were just and were combined with a careful avoidance of encouragement to the lazy, the envious, the incompetent and the ignorant.

Fortunately for Howard’s peace, that eminent New York “multi,” Samuel Jocelyn, for whom Coulter had the highest respect, was of this last class. When Howard began, Coulter was at Aiken where Jocelyn had a cottage. He had never been able to make headway with Jocelyn, and Mrs. Jocelyn deigned to give him and Mrs. Coulter only the coldest of cold nods. Just as Coulter had become so agitated by Howard’s radical course that he was preparing to go to New York to remonstrate with him, Jocelyn called.

“I came to thank you for what you are doing with your paper,” he said cordially. “It seems to me that all intelligent men who are not blind to their own ultimate interests ought to stand by you. I can’t tell you how much I admire your frankness and honesty. And you draw the line just right. You attack plunder, you defend property. Will your wife and you dine with us this evening?”

Coulter postponed his trip to New York.

On the last day of the first three months the circulation of the _News-Record_ was 147,253--an increase of 42,150 over what it was on the day Howard took charge; its advertising had increased twelve per cent; its net profits for the quarter were seventy-five thousand dollars as against fifty-seven thousand for the preceding quarter.

“Very good indeed,” was Stokely’s comment.

“Another quarter like this,” said Howard, “and I’m going to ask you to let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to illustrate the paper.”

“We’ll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this ‘yellow-journalism’--when it’s done intelligently. I always told Coulter we’d have to come to it. It’s only common sense to make a paper easy reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence--in fact, we have already. I’m getting what I want up at Albany this winter much cheaper.”

Howard winced. “He made me feel like a blackmailer,” he said to himself when Stokely had gone. “And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see.”

He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely’s cynical words persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have demanded an explanation?

He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it, but the thought still stared him in the face--“I am not so strong in my ideals of personal character as I was a year ago.”

The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth and power with self-abasement or poverty, obscurity with self-respect were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions--“I will settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely’s remark did not make a crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I’ll be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to succeed.”

But Stokely’s words and his own silence and the real reasons for his changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.

Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to the compensation of those who were paid by space and made little.

If his work had not been his amusement the long hours, the constant application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from one department to another.

In June his salary was increased to twenty-five thousand a year and his last lingering feeling of financial insecurity disappeared. For the first time in his life he felt strong enough to undertake a serious responsibility, to give hostages to fortune without fear of being unable to keep faith. He learned from Mrs. Carnarvon that Marian was returning on the _Oceanic_ on the ninth of July, and he accepted a Saturday-to-Monday invitation to Newport for the twelfth of July. It was from Segur that he got the news that Danvers was in Japan and was not returning until the autumn.

On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the _Oceanic_ steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned. “Is it a good story?” he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered. “Was there anybody on board?”

“A lot of swell people,” the young man answered; “all the women got up in the latest Paris gowns.”

“Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?”

“Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called ‘Marian, my dear.’”

Howard stopped him with “Thank you. Don’t write anything about them.”

“It was the best thing I saw--the funniest.”

“Well--don’t use the names.”

Young Blackwell turned to go. “Oh, I see--friends of yours,” he smiled. “Very well. I’ll keep ‘em out.”

Howard flushed and called him back. “Go ahead,” he said. “Write just what you were going to. Of course you wouldn’t write anything that was not fair and truthful. We don’t ‘play favourites’ here. Forget what I said.”

And so it came to pass that Mrs. Provost, half pleased, half indignant, said to Miss Trevor as they sat in the drawing room of the Pullman on the way to Newport the next day: “Just look at this, Marian dear, in the horrid _News-Record_. And it used to be such a nice paper with that slimy Coulter bowing and scraping to everybody.”

“This” was Mrs. Provost and her dogs and her maids and her asides to “Marian dear,” described with accuracy and a keen sense of the ludicrous.

“It’s too dreadful,” she continued. “There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us,” with a slight accent on the pronoun, “as common and public as tenement-house people.”

“Yes,” Miss Trevor answered absently. “But why read the newspapers? I never could get interested in them, though I’ve tried.”

XVII.

A WOMAN AND A WARNING.

On the evening of Howard’s arrival at Newport, Mrs. Carnarvon was having a few people in to dine. He had just time to dress and so saw no one until he descended to the reception room.

“You are to take in Marian,” said his hostess, going with him to where Miss Trevor was sitting, her back to the door and her attention apparently absorbed by the man facing her.

“Here’s Mr. Howard, Marian,” Mrs. Carnarvon interrupted. “Come with me, Willie. Your lady is over here and we’re going in directly.”

Marian saw that Howard was looking at her in the straight, frank fashion she remembered and liked so well. “I’ve come for you,” he said.

“Yes, you are to take me in,” she evaded, her look even lamer than her words.

“You know what I mean.” He was smiling, his heart in his eyes, as if the dozen people were not about them.

“I see you have not changed,” she laughed, answering his look in kind.

“Changed? I’m revolutionized. I was blind and now I see. I was paralyzed and behold, I walk. I was weak and lo, I am strong--strong enough for two, if necessary.”

“Now, hasn’t it occurred to you that I might possibly have something to say about my own fate?”

“You? Why, you had everything to say. I reasoned it all out with you. You simply can’t add anything to the case I made you make out for yourself when I talked it over with you. I made you protest very vigorously.”

“Well, what did I say--that is, what did you make me say?”

“You said you were engaged--pledged to another--that you could not draw back without dishonour. And I answered that no engagement could bind you to become the wife of a man you did not love; that no moral code could hold you to such a sin; that no code of honour could command you to permit a man to degrade himself and you. Then you pleaded that you were not sure you liked my kind of a life, that you feared you wanted wealth and a great establishment and social leadership and--and all that.”

“Did I?” Marian said with exaggerated astonishment.

“You did indeed. You were perfectly open with me. You let me see all that part of you which we try to keep concealed and fancy we are concealing--all that one really feels and wishes and thinks as distinguished from what one fancies he ought to feel and wish and think.”

“I wonder that you cared, after a glance behind that curtain.”

“Oh, but I like what is behind that curtain best of all. The very human things are there. They make me feel so at home.”

Dinner was announced and it was not until the second course that he had a chance to resume. Then he began as if there had been no interval:

“You said--”

Marian laughed and looked at him--a flash of her luminous blue-green eyes--and was looking away again with her usual expression. “You needn’t tell me the rest. It doesn’t matter what I said. I’ve had you with me wherever I went. You never doubted my--my caring, did you?”

“No. I couldn’t doubt you. If you were the sort of woman a man could doubt, you wouldn’t be the sort of woman I could love. And you know it isn’t vanity that makes me sure. I often wonder how you happened to care for such a--but I must not attack any one whom you like so well. No, I knew you cared by the same instinct that makes you know that I care for you.”

“But why did you come?”

“Because I have won a position for myself, have enough to enable us to live without eternally fretting over money-matters. I feel that I have the right to come. And then I could not be interested to live on, without you; and I’m willing to face, willing to have you face, whatever may come to us through me. I know that you and I together----”

“Not now--don’t--please.” Marian was pale and she was obviously under a great strain. “You see, you knew all about this. But I didn’t until you looked at me when Jessie brought you. It makes me--happy--I am so happy. But I must--I can’t control myself here.” She leaned over as if her napkin had slipped to the floor. “I love you,” she murmured.

It was Howard’s turn to struggle for self-control. “I understand,” he said, “why you wished me not to go on. You never said those words to me before--and----”

“Oh, yes I have--many and many a time.”

“With your eyes, but not with your voice--at least not so that I could hear. And--well, it is not easy to look calm and only friendly when every nerve in one’s body is vibrating like a violin string under the bow. Yes, let us talk of something else. I’ve never been acutely conscious of the presence of others when I’ve been with you. To-night I’m in great danger of forgetting them altogether.”

“That would be so like you.” Marian laughed, then raised her voice a little and went on. “Yes, your little restaurant in the Rue Louis le Grand was gone. There was a dressmaker in its place--Raudinitz. She made this. How do you like it?”

“It has the air of--of belonging to you.”

Marian looked amused. Howard shrugged his shoulders. “All roads lead to Rome,” he said.

* * * * *

Carnarvon hung about until the women went to bed, so Howard and Marian had no opportunity to be alone. As soon as he saw his last chance vanish, he went to his own room, to the solitude of its balcony in the shadow of the projecting facade with the moonlight flooding the rocks and the sea.

As he sat smoking, the recession came, the reaction from weeks of nervous tension. And with the ebb of the tide entered that Visitor who alone has the privilege of the innermost chamber where lives the man himself, unmasked of all vanity and show and pretense. The visit was not unexpected; for at every such crisis every one is certain of a call from this Visitor, this merciless critic, plain and rude of speech, rare and reluctant in praise, so mocking in our moments of elation, so cruelly frank about our follies and self-excuses when he comes in our moments of depression.

“So you are going to marry?” the Visitor said abruptly. “I thought you had made up your mind on that subject long ago.”

“Love changes a man’s point of view,” Howard replied, timid and apologetic before this quiet, relentless other-self.

“But it doesn’t change the facts of life, does it? It doesn’t change character, does it?”

“I think so. For instance, it has changed me. It has made a man of me. It has been the inspiration of the past year, strengthening me, making me ambitious, energetic. Have I not thought of her all the time, worked for her?”

“You have been uncommonly persistent--as you always are when you are thwarted.” The Visitor wore a satirical smile. “But a spurt of inspiration is one thing. A wife--responsibility--fetters----”

“Not when one loves.”

“That depends upon the kind of love--and the kind of woman--and the kind of man.”

“Could there be any higher kind of love than ours?”

“Most romantic, most high-minded--quite idyllic.” The Visitor’s tone was gently mocking. “And I don’t deny that you may go on loving each the other. But--how does she fit in with your scheme of life? What does she really know of or care about your ambitions? Why, you had so little confidence in her that you didn’t dare to think of marrying her until you had an income which you once would have thought wealth--an income which, by the way, already begins to seem small to you.”

“No, it wasn’t lack of confidence in her,” protested Howard. “It was lack of confidence in myself.”

“True, that did have something to do with it, I grant you. And that reminds me--what has become of all your cowardice about responsibility?”

“Oh, I’m changed there.”

“Are you sure? Are you not deceived by this sudden and maybe momentary streak of good luck in your affairs? You have fixed your ambition high--very high. You wish to make an honest and a useful and a distinguished career. You know you have weaknesses. I needn’t remind you--need I--that you have had to fight those weaknesses? How could you have won thus far if you had been responsible for others instead of being alone, and certain that the consequences would fall upon yourself only? I want to see you continue to win. I don’t want to see you dragged down by extravagance, by love for this woman, by ambition of the kind her friends approve. I don’t want to see you--You were silent when Stokely insulted you!”

“Love--such love as mine--and for such a woman--and with such love in return--drag down? Impossible!”

“Not so--not exactly so, though I must say you are plausible. But don’t forget that you and she are not starting out to make a career. Don’t forget that she is already fixed--her tastes, habits, friendships, associations, ideals already formed. Don’t forget that your love is the only bond between you--and that it may drag you toward her mode of life instead of drawing her towards yours. Don’t forget that your own associations and temptations are becoming more and more difficult. I repeat, you cringed--yes, cringed--when Stokely insulted you. Why?”

Howard was silent.

“And,” the Visitor went on relentlessly, “let me remind you that not only did you give her up without a struggle a few months ago but also she gave you up without a word.”

“But what could she have said?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m not familiar with ways feminine. But I know--we know--that, if there had not been some reservation in her love, some hesitation about you--unconscious, perhaps, but powerful enough to make her yield--she would not have let you go as she did.”

“But she did not realise, as I did not, how much our love meant to us.”

“Perhaps--that sounds well. All I ask is, will she help you? Are you really so much stronger than you were only four months ago? Or are you stimulated by success? Suppose that days of disaster, of peril, come? What then?”

“But they will not. I have won a position. I can always command a large salary--perhaps not quite so much but still a large salary.”

“Perhaps--if you don’t trouble yourself about principles. But how would it be if you would do nothing, write nothing, except what you think is honest? Would you ask her to face it? Tell me, tell yourself honestly, have you the right to assume a responsibility you may not be able to bear, to invite temptations you may not be able to resist?”

There was a long silence. At last Howard stood up and flung his cigar into the sea. His face was drawn and his eyes burned.

“God in heaven!” he cried, “am I not human? May I not have companionship and sympathy and love? Must I be alone and friendless and loveless always? That is not life; that is not just. I will not; I will not. I love her--love her--love her. With the best that there is in me, I love her. Am I such a coward that I cannot face even my own weaknesses?”

XVIII.

HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE.

In August Marian and Mrs. Carnarvon came to the Waldorf for two days. Howard had offered to show them how a newspaper is made; and Mrs. Carnarvon, finding herself bored by too many days of the same few people every day, herself proposed the trip. The three dined in the open air on Sherry’s piazza and at eleven o’clock drove down the Avenue, to the east at Washington Square, and through the Bowery.

“I never saw it before,” said Marian, “and I must say I shall not care if I never see it again. Why do people make so much fuss about slums, I wonder?”

“Oh, they’re so queer, so like another world,” suggested Mrs. Carnarvon. “It gives you such a delightful sensation of sadness. It’s just like a not-too-melancholy play, only better because it’s real. Then, too, it makes one feel so much more comfortable and clean and contented in one’s own surroundings.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Jessie.” Marian spoke in mock indignation. “The next thing we know you’ll sink to being a patron of the poor and go about enjoying yourself at making them self-conscious and envious.”

“They’re not at all sad down this way,” said Howard, “except in the usual inescapable human ways. When they’re not hit too hard, they bear up wonderfully. You see, living on the verge of ruin and tumbling over every few weeks get one used to it. It ceases to give the sensation of event.”

Their automobile had turned into Park Row and so reached the _News-Record_ building in Printing House Square. Howard took the two women to the elevator and they shot upward in a car crowded with telegraph messengers, each carrying one or more envelopes, some of them bearing in bold black type the words: “News!--Rush!”

“I suppose that is the news for the paper?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked.

“A little of it. Our special cable and special news from towns to which we have no direct wire and also the _Associated Press_ reports come this way. But we don’t use much _Associated Press_ matter, as it is the same for all the papers.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Throw it away. A New York newspaper throws away every night enough to fill two papers and often enough to fill five or six.”

“Isn’t that very wasteful?”

“Yes, but it’s necessary. Every editor has his own idea of what to print and what not to print and how much space each news event calls for. It is there that editors show their judgment or lack of it. To print the things the people wish to read in the quantities the people like and in the form the most people can most easily understand--that is success as an editor.”

“No doubt,” said Marian, thinking of the low view all her friends took of Howard’s newspaper, “if you were making a newspaper to please yourself, you would make a very different one.”

“Oh, no,” laughed Howard, “I print what I myself like; that is, what I like to find in a newspaper. We print human news made by human beings and interesting to human beings. And we don’t pretend to be anything more than human. We try never to think of our own idea of what the people ought to read, but always to get at what the people themselves think they ought to read. We are journalists, not news-censors.”

“I must say newspapers do not interest me.” Marian confessed it a little diffidently.

“You are probably not interested,” Howard answered, “because you don’t care for news. It is a queer passion--the passion for news. The public has it in a way. But to see it in its delirium you must come here.”

“This seems quiet enough.” Marian looked about Howard’s upstairs office. It was silent, and from the windows one could see New York and its rivers and harbour, vast, vague, mysterious, animated yet quiet.

“Oh, I rarely come here--a few hours a week,” Howard replied. “On this floor the editorial writers work.” He opened a door leading to a private hall. There were five small rooms. In each sat a coatless man, smoking and writing. One was Segur, and Howard called to him.

“Are you too busy to look after Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor for a few minutes? I must go downstairs.”

Segur gave some “copy” to a boy who handed him a bundle of proofs and rushed away down a narrow staircase. Howard descended in the elevator, and Segur, who had put on his coat, sat talking to the two women as he looked through the proofs, glancing at each narrow strip, then letting it drop to the floor.

“You don’t mind my working?” he asked. “I have to look at these things to see if there is any news that calls for editional attention. If I find anything and can think an editorial thought about it, I write it; and if Howard is in the humour, perhaps the public is permitted to read it.”

“Is he severe?” asked Mrs. Carnarvon.

“The ‘worst ever,’” laughed Segur. “He is very positive and likes only a certain style and won’t have anything that doesn’t exactly fit his ideas. He’s easy to get along with but difficult to work for.”

“I imagine his positiveness is the secret of his success.” Marian knew that Segur was half in jest and was fond of Howard. But she couldn’t endure hearing him criticised.

“No. I think he succeeds because he works, pushes straight on, never stops to repair blunders but never makes the same kind of a blunder the second time.”

Segur’s eye caught an item that suggested an editorial paragraph. He sat at Howard’s desk, thought a moment, scrawled half a dozen lines in a large ragged hand on a sheet of ruled yellow paper, and pressed an electric button. The boy came, handed him another thick bundle of proofs, took the “copy” and withdrew. Just then Howard returned.

“We’ll go down to the news-room,” he said.

The windows of the great news-room were thrown wide. Scores of electric lights made it bright. At the various desks or in the aisles were perhaps fifty men, most of them young, none of them beyond middle age. They were in every kind of clothing from the most fashionable summer attire to an old pair of cheap and stained duck trousers, collarless negligee shirt open all the way down the front and suspenders hanging about the hips.

Some were writing long-hand; others were pounding away at the typewriter; others were talking in undertones to “typists” taking dictation to the machine; others were reading “copy” and altering it with huge blue pencils which made apparently unreadable smears wherever they touched the paper. In and out skurried a dozen office-boys, responding to calls from various desks, bringing bundles of proofs, thrusting copy into boxes which instantly and noisily shot up through the ceiling.

It was a scene of confusion and furious activity. The face of each individual was calm and his motions by themselves were not excited. But taking all together and adding the tense, strained expression underneath the calm--the expression of the professional gambler--there was a total of active energy that was oppressive.

“We had a fire below us one night,” said Howard. “We are two hundred feet from the street and there were no fire escapes. We all thought it was good-bye. It was nearly half an hour before we found out that the smoke booming up the stairways and into this room had no danger behind it.”

“Gracious!” Mrs. Carnarvon shuddered and looked uneasily about.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Howard reassured her. “We’ve arranged things better since then. Besides, that fire demonstrated that the building was fireproof.”

“And what happened?” asked Miss Trevor.

“Why, just what you see now. The Managing Editor, Mr. King over there--I’ll introduce him to you presently--went up to a group of men standing at one of the windows. They were pretending indifference as they looked down at the crowd which was shouting and tossing its arms in a way that more than suggested pity for us poor devils up here. Well, King said: ‘Boys, boys, this isn’t getting out a paper.’ Every one went back to his work and--and that was all.”

They went on to the room behind the newsroom. As Howard opened its heavy door a sound, almost a roar, of clicking instruments and typewriters burst out. Here again were scores of desks with men seated at them, every man with a typewriter and a telegraph instrument before him.

“These are our direct wires,” Howard explained. “Our correspondents in all the big cities, east, west, north and south and in London, are at the other end of these wires. Let me show you.”

Howard spoke to the operator nearest them. “Whom have you got?”

“I’m taking three thousand words from Kansas City,” he replied. “Washington is on the next wire.”

“Ask Mr. Simpson how the President is to-night,” Howard said to the Washington operator.

His instrument clicked a few times and was silent. Almost immediately the receiver began to click and, as the operator dashed the message off on his typewriter the two women read over his shoulder: “Just came from White House. He is no better, probably a little worse because weaker. Simpson.”

“And can you hear just as quickly from London?” Marian asked.

“Almost. I’ll try. There is always a little delay in transmission from the land systems to the cable system; and messages have to be telephoned between our office in Trafalgar Square and the cable office down in the city. Let’s see, it’s five o’clock in the morning in London now. They’ve been having it hot there. I’ll ask about the weather.”

Howard dictated to the man at the London wire: “Roberts, London. How is the weather? Howard.”

In less than ten minutes the cable-man handed Howard a typewritten slip reading: “_News-Record_, New York, Howard: Thermometer 97 our office now. Promises hottest day yet. Roberts.”

“I never before realised how we have destroyed distance,” said Mrs. Carnarvon.

“I don’t think any one but a newspaper editor completely realises it,” Howard answered. “As one sits here night after night, sending messages far and wide and receiving immediate answers, he loses all sense of space. The whole world seems to be in his anteroom.”

“I begin to see fascination in this life of yours.” Marian’s face showed interest to enthusiasm. “This atmosphere tightens one’s nerves. It seems to me that in the next moment I shall hear of some thrilling happening.”

“It’s listening for the first rumour of the ‘about to happen’ that makes newspaper-men so old and yet so young, so worn and yet so eager. Every night, every moment of every night, we are expecting it, hoping for some astounding news which it will test our resources to the utmost to present adequately.”

From the news-room they went up to the composing room--a vast hall of confusion, filled with strange-looking machines and half-dressed men and boys. Some were hurrying about with galleys of type, with large metal frames; some were wheeling tables here and there; scores of men and a few women were seated at the machines. These responded to touches upon their key-boards by going through uncanny internal agitations. Then out from a mysterious somewhere would come a small thin strip of almost hot metal, the width of a newspaper column and marked along one edge with letters printed backwards.

Up through the floor of this room burst boxes filled with “copy.” Boys snatched the scrawled, ragged-looking sheets and tossed them upon a desk. A man seated there cut them into little strips, hanging each strip upon a hook. A line of men filed rapidly past these hooks, snatching each man a single strip and darting away to a machine.

“It is getting late,” said Howard. “The final rush for the first edition is on. They are setting the last ‘copy.’”

“But,” Mrs. Carnarvon asked, “how do they ever get the different parts of the different news-items together straight?”

“The man who is cutting copy there--don’t you see him make little marks on each piece? Those marks tell them just where their ‘take,’ as they call it, belongs.”

They went over to the part of the great room where there were many tables, on each a metal frame about the size of a page of the newspaper. Some of the frames were filled with type, others were partly empty. And men were lifting into them the galleys of type under the direction of the Night Editor and his staff. As soon as a frame was filled two men began to even the ends of the columns and then to screw up an inside framework which held the type firmly in place. Then a man laid a great sheet of what looked like blotting-paper upon the page of type and pounded it down with a mallet and scraped it with a stiff brush.

“That is the matrix,” said Howard. “See him putting it on the elevator.” They looked down the shaft. “It has dropped to the sub-basement,” said Howard, “two hundred and fifty feet below us. They are already bending it into a casting-box of the shape of the cylinders on the presses; metal will be poured in and when it is cool, you will have the metal form, the metal impression of the page. It will be fastened upon the press to print from.”

They walked back through the room which was now in almost lunatic confusion--forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their swift motions making an impression of almost irrational excitement.

“Why such haste?” asked Marian.

“Because the paper must be put to press. It must contain the very latest news and it must also catch the mails; and the mail-trains do not wait.”

They descended in the main elevator to the ground floor and then went down a dark and winding staircase until they faced an iron door. Howard pushed it open and they entered the press-room. Its temperature was blood-heat, its air heavy and nauseating with the odours of ink, moist paper and oil, its lights dim. They were in a gallery and below them on all sides were the huge presses, silent, motionless, waiting.

Suddenly a small army of men leaped upon the mighty machines, scrambled over them, then sprang back. With a tremendous roar that shook the entire building the presses began to revolve, to hurl out great heaps of newspapers.

“Those presses eat six hundred thousand pounds of paper and four tons of ink a week,” Howard shouted. “They can throw out two hundred thousand complete papers an hour--papers that are cut, folded, pasted, and ready to send away. Let us go before you are stifled. This air is horrible.”

They returned in the elevator to his lofty office. Even there a slight vibration from the press-room could be felt. But it was calm and still, a fit place from which to view the panorama of sleeping city and drowsy harbour tranquil in the moonlight.

“Look.” Howard was leaning over the railing just outside his window.

They looked straight down three hundred feet to the street made bright by electric lights. Scores of wagons loaded with newspapers were rushing away from the several newspaper buildings. The shouts, the clash of hoofs and heavy tires on the granite blocks, the whirr of automobiles, were borne faintly upward.

“It is the race to the railway stations to catch the mail-trains,” Howard explained. “The first editions go to the country. These wagons are hurrying in order that tens of thousands of people hundreds of miles away, at Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and scores on scores of towns between and beyond, may find the New York newspapers on their breakfast-tables.”

The office-boy came with a bundle of papers, warm, moist, the ink brilliant.

“And now for the inquest,” said Howard.

“The inquest?” Marian looked at him inquiringly.

“Yes--viewing the corpse. It was to give birth to this that there was all that intensity and fury--that and a thousand times more. For, remember, this paper is the work of perhaps twenty thousand brains, in every part of the world, throughout civilisation and far into the depths of barbarism. Look at these date lines--cities and towns everywhere in our own country, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America. You’ll find most of the capitals of Europe represented; and Africa, north, south and central, east and west coast. Here’s India and here the heart of Siberia.

“There is China and there Japan and there Australia. Think of these scores of newspaper correspondents telegraphing news of the doings of their fellow beings--not what they did last month or last year, but what they did a few hours ago--some of it what they were doing while we were dining up at Sherry’s. Then think of the thousands on thousands of these newspaper-men, eager, watchful agents of publicity, who were on duty but had nothing to report to-day. And----”

Howard shrugged his shoulders and tossed the paper from him.

“There it lies,” he said, “a corpse. Already a corpse, its life ended before it was fairly born. There it is, dead and done for--writ in water, and by anonymous hands. Who knows who did it? Who cares?”

He caught Marian’s eyes, looking wonder and reproach.

“I don’t like to hear you say that,” she said, forgetting Mrs. Carnarvon. “Other men--yes, the little men who work for the cheap rewards. But not you, who work for the sake of work. This night’s experience has thrilled me. I understand your profession now. I see what it means to us all, to civilisation, what a splendid force for good, for enlightenment, for uplifting it is. I can see a great flood of light radiating from this building, pouring into the dark places, driving away ignorance. And the thunder of those presses seems to me to fill the world with some mighty command--what is it?--oh, yes--I can hear it distinctly. It is, ‘Let there be light!’”

Mrs. Carnarvon’s back was toward them and she was looking out at the harbour. Howard put his hands upon Marian’s shoulders and they looked each the other straight in the eyes.

“Lovers and comrades,” he said, “always. And how strong we are--together!”

XIX.

“I MUST BE RICH.”

“While I don’t feel dependent upon the owners of the _News-Record_, still I am not exactly independent of them either. And if I left them it would only be to become dependent in the same way upon somebody else. A man who makes his living by the advocacy of principles should be wholly free. If he isn’t, the principles are sure sooner or later to become incidental to the living, instead of the living being incidental to the principles.”

“But you see--perhaps I ought to have told you before--that is, there may be”--Marian was stammering and blushing.

“What’s the matter? Don’t frighten me by looking so--so criminal,” Howard laughed.

It was late in August. Marian was visiting Mrs. Brandon at Irvington-on-the-Hudson and she and Howard were driving.

“I never told you. But the fact is”--she hesitated again.

“Is it about your other engagement? You never told me about that--how you broke it off. I don’t want you to tell me unless you wish to. You know I never meddle in past matters. I’m simply trying to help you out.”

“Instead, you’re making it worse. I’d rather not tell you that if----”

“We’ll never speak of it again. And now, what is it that is troubling you?”

“I have been trying to tell you--I wish you wouldn’t look at me--I’ve got a small income--it’s really very small.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”