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John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

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Title: The Great God Success

Author: John Graham (David Graham Phillips)


Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7989]
This file was first posted on June 10, 2003
Last Updated: November 18, 2016

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THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS

A NOVEL

By John Graham (David Graham Phillips)



The Gregg Press / Ridgewood, N.J.



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE

II. THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS

III. A PARK ROW CELEBRITY

IV. IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA

V. ALICE

VI. IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND

VII. A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT

VIII. A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL

IX. AMBITION AWAKENS

X. THE ETERNAL MASCULINE

XI. TRESPASSING

XII. MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH

XIII. RECKONING WITH DANVERS

XIV. THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR

XV. YELLOW JOURNALISM

XVI. MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS

XVII. A WOMAN AND A WARNING

XVIII. HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE

XIX. “I MUST BE RICH.”

XX. ILLUSION

XXI. WAVERING

XXII. THE SHENSTONE EPISODE

XXIII. EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING

XXIV. “MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”

XXV. THE PROMISED LAND

XXVI. IN POSSESSION

XXVII. THE HARVEST

XXVIII. SUCCESS




THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS




I.

THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE.


“O your college paper, I suppose?”

“No, I never wrote even a letter to the editor.”

“Took prizes for essays?”

“No, I never wrote if I could help it.”

“But you like to write?”

“I’d like to learn to write.”

“You say you are two months out of college--what college?”

“Yale.”

“Hum--I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking
or railroads. ‘Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here’ is over
the door of this profession.”

“I haven’t the money-making instinct.”

“We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start.”

“Couldn’t you make it twenty?”

The Managing Editor of the _News-Record_ turned slowly in his chair
until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the
staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled
out over his low “stick-up” collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids
until his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his glasses,
straight into Howard’s eyes.

“Why?” he asked. “Why should we?”

Howard’s grey eyes showed embarrassment and he flushed to the line of
his black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. “Well--you
see--the fact is--I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that
scale. I’m not clever at money matters. I’m afraid I’d get in a mess
with only fifteen.”

“My dear young man,” said Mr. King, “I started here at fifteen dollars a
week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming.”

“Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you
and worked too. Now I have only myself.”

Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently
preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by
a stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But
Howard’s tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to
bring into Mr. King’s mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife.
She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years
before, he to get a place as reporter on the _News-Record_, she to
start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and
confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and
opened the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell
apart:

He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from
the day’s buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens.
There stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright;
her lips are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that
began hours before his and has been a succession of exasperations and
humiliations against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of
her father, a distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection,
“Victory,” she whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his
coat collar. “Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and
everything paid up!”

Mr. King opened his eyes--they had been closed less than five seconds.
“Well, let it be twenty--though just why I’m sure I don’t know. And
we’ll give you a four weeks’ trial. When will you begin?”

“Now,” answered the young man, glancing about the room. “And I shall try
to show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or
not.”

It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five
windows overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about
the City Hall day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King’s
roll-top desk was at the first window. Under each of the other windows
was a broad flat table desk--for copy-readers. At the farthest of these
sat the City Editor--thin, precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow
cheeks, ragged grey-brown moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and
dark brown eyes. He looked nervously tired and, because brown was his
prevailing shade, dusty. He rose as Mr. King came with young Howard.

“Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him
how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on
comfortably together.”

Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at
the other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality.
“Let me see, where shall we put you?” And his glance wandered along
the rows of sloping table-desks--those nearer the windows lighted by
daylight; those farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool,
breezy August afternoon the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far
into the room.

“Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache,” said Mr.
Bowring, “toiling away in his shirt-sleeves--there?”

“Near the railing at the entrance?”

“Precisely. I think I will put you next him.” Mr. Bowring touched a
button on his desk and presently an office boy--a mop of auburn curls,
a pert face and gangling legs in knickerbockers--hurried up with a “Yes,
Sir?”

“Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and--please
scrape your feet along the floor as little as possible.”

The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park
pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made
acquainted and went toward their desks together. “A few moments--if you
will excuse me--and I’m done,” said Kittredge motioning Howard into the
adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.

Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was
perhaps twenty-five years old--fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking
in a pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too
self-complacent to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet
after sheet of soft white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard
noticed that at the end of each sentence he made a little cross with a
circle about it, and that he began each paragraph with a paragraph sign.
Presently he scrawled a big double cross in the centre of the sheet
under the last line of writing and gathered up his sheets in the
numbered order. “Done, thank God,” he said. “And I hope they won’t
butcher it.”

“Do you send it to be put in type?” asked Howard.

“No,” Kittredge answered with a faint smile. “I hand it in to Mr.
Bowring--the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at
six, it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down
if necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the
composing room--see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the
wall?--well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the
type and make up the forms.”

“I’m a complete ignoramus,” said Howard, “I hope you’ll not mind my
trying to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you.”

“Glad to help you, I’m sure. I had to go through this two years ago when
I came here from Princeton.”

Kittredge “turned in” his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.

“What were you writing about, if I may ask?” inquired Howard.

“About some snakes that came this morning in a ‘tramp’ from South
America. One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a
windlass. The cook was passing and it caught him. He fainted with fright
and the beast squeezed him to death. It’s a fine story--lots of amusing
and dramatic details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won’t cut
it. I hope not, anyhow. I need the money.”

“You are paid by the column?”

“Yes. I’m on space--what they call a space writer. If a man is of any
account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and
then put him on space. That means that he will make anywhere from forty
to a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best
is about eighty.”

“Eighty dollars a week,” thought Howard. “Fifty-two times eighty is
forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out
two weeks for vacation.” To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of
imagination. If he could make so much as that!--he who had grave doubts
whether, no matter how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living
from the world.

Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through
the gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up
toward the daylight end of the room.

“That’s the best of ‘em all,” said Kittredge in a low tone. “His name is
Sewell. He’s a Harvard man--Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye gods,
how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation.
Sewell disappeared--frightful bust. A month afterward they found him
under an assumed name over on Blackwell’s Island, doing three months for
disorderly conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying.
It began “Merrily over the Snow” and went on about light hearts and
youth and joy and all that--you know, the usual thing. When he got the
money, she didn’t need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over
in Long Island City. So he ‘blew in’ the money on a wake.”

Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: “Was it a good
story, Sam?”

“Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the
cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf--everything else gone to the
pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by
side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the
mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose
the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and
daubed on the wall in big scrawling letters: ‘There is no God!’ Then
he took his wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own
throat. And there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers,
dead. It was murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write.”

Kittredge introduced Howard--“a Yale man--just came on the paper.”

“Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that
there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The
room is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to
leave. It is all bottom, no top.” Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in
spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his
work.

“He’s sober,” said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, “so his story
is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow.”

Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view
of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the
tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge’s story of the man
squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell’s story, so graphically outlined,
filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his
feelings.

“I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things,” he suggested.

“That’s our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does.
You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of
course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly
that you can’t write. You have to remember always that you’re not there
to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record.
You tell what your eyes see. You’ll soon get so that you can and will
make good stories out of your own calamaties.”

“Is that a portrait of the editor?” asked Howard, pointing to a grimed
oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked
white wall except a few ragged maps.

“That--oh, that is old man Stone--the ‘great condenser.’ He’s there for
a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a
warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work
at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other
editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for
drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night
in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was
drunk. I have my doubts.”

“Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already
learned something very valuable.”

“What’s that?” asked Kittredge, “that it’s a good profession to get out
of?”

“No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism
any more than in any other profession.”

“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony
and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the
insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a
school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something
else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done
for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”

“I wonder if it doesn’t attract a great many men who have a little
talent and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint
their vanity rather than their merit.”

“That sounds well,” replied Kittredge, “and there’s some truth in
it. But, believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual
sacrifice of youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you
here? Because we are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon
as we get a little older, we shall be stale and, though still young in
years, we must step aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new
point of view.”

“But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of
view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in
journalism when one can’t escape them in any other profession?”

“But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at
most one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the
temptations.”

“How do you mean?”

Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:

“We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep
while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole
world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night,
wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains
and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?”

“That is true,” said Howard. “There are the all-night saloons and--the
like.”

“And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young
women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o’clock in the
morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a
respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once
or twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth
Avenue in the afternoon.”

“Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you,” an office boy said
and Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard’s shoulder
and said: “No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I’m writing
books.”

“Kittredge,” thought Howard, “I wonder, is this Henry Jennings
Kittredge, whose stories are on all the news stands?” He saw an envelope
on the floor at his feet. The address was “Henry Jennings Kittredge,
Esq.”

When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank
admiration: “Why, I didn’t know you were the Kittredge that everybody is
talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint.”

Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. “At fifteen cents a copy, I have to
sell ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months.
And you’d be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man
can make out of a book. Don’t be distressed because they keep you here
with nothing to do but wonder how you’ll have the courage to face the
cashier on pay day. It’s the system. Your chance will come.”

It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the
Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day
sent him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. “Try
to get a new point of view,” he said, “and let yourself loose. There’s
usually plenty of room in Monday’s paper.”

Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for
the “new point of view” of the crowds he saw there--these monotonous
millions, he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in
the heart of the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined
alone at the Casino. He went down to the office early and wrote
diligently--about two thousand words. When he had finished, the Night
City Editor told him that he might go as there would be nothing more
that night.

He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with
a News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page:
first, the larger “heads”--such a long story would call for a “big
head;” then the smaller “heads”--they may have been crowded and have
had to cut it down; then the single-line “heads”--surely they found a
“stickful” or so worth printing.

At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were
grouped under the general heading “City Jottings” at the end of an
inside column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was
two lines in length:

“The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at
that vast trough of country air in the heart of the city.”

As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically
at the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the
sneering frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his
fellow reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty
spring for a foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.

“Had anything in yet?” Kittredge inquired casually, late in the
afternoon.

“I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the
City Jottings,” replied Howard, reddening but laughing.

“The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel
suit on it.”





II.

THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.


At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk
and asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the
Assistant City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could
not hear.

“We like you, Mr. Howard.” Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a
carefulness in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. “And we
have been impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you
are not fitted for this profession. You write well enough, but you
do not seem to get the newspaper--the news--idea. So we feel that in
justice to you and to ourselves we ought to let you know where you
stand. If you wish, we shall be glad to have you remain with us two
weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be looking about you. I am certain that
you will succeed somewhere, in some line, sooner or later. But I think
that the newspaper profession is a waste of your time.”

Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown
away or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet
it crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:

“No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my
case and tell me so soon.”

“Don’t hesitate to stay on for the two weeks,” Mr. Bowring continued.
“We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better
advantage than if you were out of a place.”

“I’ll stay the two weeks,” Howard said, “unless I find something
sooner.”

“Don’t be more discouraged than you can help,” said Mr. Bowring. “You
may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of
us--I myself, I fear--find out after years and--when it is too late.”

Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the
door of the profession: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” What was
the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that
journalism offered the most splendid of careers--the development of the
mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service
of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice
and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy
minds of the masses of mankind?

Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. “Can
it be,” he thought, “that I cannot survive in a profession where the
poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I
cannot catch the trick?”

He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting
the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order
in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes
of the reader--what they displayed on each page and why; how they
apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he
applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press--the
science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the
hurrying, impatient public.

He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle
instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting
to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending
calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it
impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small
opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two
weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item
of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not
at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little
hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief
of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have
been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out
for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson
in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged
downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.

“Buck up, old man,” said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after
several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he
strongly suspected it. “Don’t mind old Bowring. You’re sure to get on,
and, if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I’ll give you a
note to Montgomery--he’s City Editor over at the _World_-shop--and he’ll
take you on. In some ways you will do better there. You’ll rise faster,
get a wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one
advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It’s more like a club
than an office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I’ll give you a note
to-night. You will be at work over there to-morrow.”

“I think I’ll wait a few days,” said Howard, his tone corresponding to
the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.

The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave
him a newspaper-clipping which read:

  “Bald Peak, September 29--Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
  of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
  into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
  dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
  It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
  and wild cats.”

“Yes, I saw this in the _Herald_,” said Howard.

“Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the
story--if it is not a ‘fake,’ as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your
story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow
night.”

“Of course it’s a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration,” thought Howard
as he turned away. “If Bowring had not been all but sure there was
nothing in it, he would never have given it to me.”

He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon
his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night
without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been
in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father
had made to him just before he died: “Remember that ninety per cent
of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where
to-morrow’s food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid.” But
just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer.
He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure.
“What is to become of me?” he kept repeating, his heart like lead and
his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.

At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the
early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the
baggage-master standing in front of the steps.

“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near
here?”

“Yes--three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.

“Have they found him yet?”

“No--nor never will alive--that’s my opinion.”

Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was
on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two
hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’
by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and
she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it
ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes
ag’in.”

Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open;
the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was
thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the
window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother--a
young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined,
beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for
a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy
or to despair.

       *       *       *       *       *

That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense
and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak--the wildest
wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on
the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely
covered with bushes and tangled creepers.

The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a
swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the
low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open,
firm ground.

In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was
the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched
straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His
gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears
of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone
into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro,
apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained
and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter
lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.

As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy
looked a solemn welcome.

“Want mamma,” he said. “I’se hungry.”

One of the men picked him up--the gingham dress was saturated.

“You’re hungry?” asked the man, his voice choking.

“Yes. An’ I’se so wet. It wained and wained.” Then the child began to
sob. “It was dark,” he whispered, “an’ cold. I want my mamma.”

It was an hour’s tedious journey back to Dent’s by the shortest route.
At the top of the hill those near the cottage saw the boy in the arms of
the man who had found him. They shouted and the mother sprang out of the
house and came running, stumbling down the path to the gate. She caught
at the gate-post and stood there, laughing, screaming, sobbing.

“Baby! Baby!” she called.

The little boy turned his head and stretched out his thin, blood-stained
arms. She ran toward him and snatched him from the young farmer.

“Hungry, mamma,” he sobbed, hiding his face on her shoulder.

       *       *       *       *       *

Howard wrote his story on the train, going down to New York. It was a
straightforward chronicle of just what he had seen and heard. He began
at the beginning--the little mountain home, the family of three, the
disappearance of the child. He described the perils of the mountains,
the storm, the search, the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene,
ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around
them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no
changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition.
When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily.
He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a
story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of that
intense human drama with its climax of joy. His own concerns seemed
secondary, of no consequence.

He reached the office at half-past nine, handed in his “copy” and went
away. He was in bed at half-past ten and was at once asleep. At eleven
the next morning a knocking awakened him from a sound sleep that had
restored and refreshed him. “A messenger from the office,” was called
through the door in answer to his inquiry. He took the note from the boy
and tore it open:

“My dear Mr. Howard: Thank you for the splendid story you gave us last
night. It is one of the best, if not the best, we have had the pleasure
of publishing in years. Your salary has been raised to twenty-five
dollars a week.

“Congratulations. You have ‘caught on’ at last. I’m glad to take back
what I said the other day.

“HENRY C. BOWRING.”





III.

A PARK ROW CELEBRITY.


Kittredge was the first to congratulate him when he reached the office.
“Everybody is talking about your story,” he said. “I must say I was
surprised when I read it. I had begun to fear that you would never catch
the trick--for, with most of us writing is only a trick. But now I see
that you are a born writer. Your future is in your own hands.”

“You think I can learn to write?”

“That is the sane way to put it. Yes, I know that you can. If you’ll
only not be satisfied with the results that come easy, you will make a
reputation. Not a mere Park Row reputation, but the real thing.”

Howard got flattery enough in the next few days to turn a stronger
head than was his at twenty-two. But a few partial failures within a
fortnight sobered him and steadied him. His natural good sense made him
take himself in hand. He saw that his success had been to a great extent
a happy accident; that to repeat it, to improve upon it he must study
life, study the art of expression. He must keep his senses open to
impression. He must work at style, enlarge his vocabulary, learn the use
of words, the effect of varying combinations of words both as to sound
and as to meaning. “I must learn to write for the people,” he thought,
“and that means to write the most difficult of all styles.”

He was, then and always, one of those who like others and are liked by
them, yet never seek company and so are left to themselves. As he had
no money to spare and a deep aversion to debt, he was not tempted into
joining in the time-wasting dissipations that were now open to him. He
worked hard at his profession and, when he left the office, usually went
direct to his rooms to read until far into the morning. He was often
busy sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. His day at reporting was
long--from noon until midnight, and frequently until three in the
morning. But the work was far different from the grind which is the lot
of the young men striving in other professions or in business. It
was the most fascinating work imaginable for an intelligent, thirsty
mind--the study of human nature under stress of the great emotions.

His mode of thought and his style made Mr. Bowring and Mr. King give him
much of this particular kind of reporting. So he was always observing
love, hate, jealousy, revenge, greed. He saw these passions in action in
the lives of people of all kinds and conditions. And he saw little else.
The reporter is a historian. And history is, as Gibbon says, for the
most part “a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

For many a man this has been a ruinous, one-sided development. Howard
was saved by his extremely intelligent, sympathetic point of view.
He saw the whole of each character, each conflict that he was sent to
study. If the point of the story was the good side of human nature--some
act of generosity or self-sacrifice--he did not exaggerate it into
godlike heroism but adjusted it in its proper prospective by bringing
out its human quality and its human surroundings. If the main point was
violence or sordidness or baseness, he saw the characteristics which
relieved and partially redeemed it. His news-reports were accounts of
the doings not of angels or devils but of human beings, accounts written
from a thoroughly human standpoint.

Here lay the cause of his success. In all his better stories--for
he often wrote poor ones--there was the atmosphere of sincerity, of
realism, the marks of an acute observer, without prejudice and with
a justifiable leaning toward a belief in the fundamental worth of
humanity. Where others were cynical he was just. Where others were
sentimental, he had sincere, healthful sentiment. Where others were
hysterical, he calmly and accurately described, permitting the tragedy
to reveal itself instead of burying it beneath high-heaped adjectives.
Simplicity of style was his aim and he was never more delighted by any
compliment than by one from the chief political reporter.

“That story of yours this morning,” said this reporter whose lack as
a writer was more than compensated by his ability to get intimately
acquainted with public men, “reads as if a child might have written it.
I don’t see how you get such effects without any style at all. You just
let your story tell itself.”

“Well, you see,” replied Howard, “I am writing for the masses, and fine
writing would be wasted upon them.”

“You’re right,” said Jackman, “we don’t need literature on this
paper--long words, high-sounding phrases and all that sort of thing.
What we want is just plain, simple English that goes straight to the
point.”

“Like Shakespeare’s and Bunyan’s,” suggested Kittredge with a grin.

“Shakespeare? Fudge!” scoffed Jackman. “Why he couldn’t have made a
living as a space-writer on a New York newspaper.”

“No, I don’t think he would have staid long in Park Row,” replied
Kittredge with a subtlety of meaning that escaped Jackman.

A few days before New Year’s the Managing Editor looked up and smiled as
Howard was passing his desk.

“How goes it?” he asked.

“Oh, not so badly,” Howard answered, “but I am a good deal depressed at
times.”

“Depressed? Nonsense! You’ve got everything--youth, health and freedom.
And by the way, you are going on space the first of the year. Our rule
is a year on salary before space. But we felt that it was about time to
strengthen the rule by making an exception.”

Howard stammered thanks and went away. This piece of news, dropped
apparently so carelessly by Mr. King, meant a revolution in fortune for
him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars
a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not
having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare
their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt
that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude
for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught
him to conceal.

“Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least--circumstances of
ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of
investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,”
 he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to
satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will
mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.”

But--a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even
with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it
was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of
independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better
food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some
friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished
two thousand dollars was accounted for.

Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving
money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away
his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and,
whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy
forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,”
 he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall
be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession.
All about him were men like himself--leading this gambler’s life of
feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable
incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of
failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income.

He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived
plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of
first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of
continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia--he
was inert but neither idle nor lazy--combined to make futile his efforts
to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.

He had been four years a reporter and was almost twenty-six years old.
He was known throughout his profession in New York, although he had
never signed an article. One remarkable “human interest” story after
another had forced the knowledge of his abilities upon the reporters and
editors of other newspapers. And he was spoken of as one of the best and
in some respects the best “all round reporter” in the city. This meant
that he was capable to any emergency--that, whatever the subject, he
could write an accurate, graphic, consecutive and sustained story and
could get it into the editor’s hands quickly.

Indeed he possessed facility to the perilous degree. What others
achieved only after long toil, he achieved without effort. This was
due chiefly to the fact that he never relaxed but was at all times
the journalist, reading voraciously newspapers, magazines and the best
books, and using what he read; observing constantly and ever trying to
see something that would make “good copy”; turning over phrases in his
mind to test the value of words both as to sound and as to meaning.
He was an incessantly active man. His great weakness was the common
weakness--failure to concentrate. In Park Row they regarded him as a
brilliant success. Brilliant he was. But a success he was not. He knew
that he was a brilliant failure--and not very brilliant.

“Why is it?” he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction
from the nervous strain of some exciting experience. “Shall I never
seize any of these chances that are always thrusting themselves at
me? Shall I always act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to
ambition never come?”





IV.

IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.


Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a
“furnished-room house” there because it was cheap. He staid because he
was comfortable and was without a motive for moving.

It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay
fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate
means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be
seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings
toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as
is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of
that city. Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans,
Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and
negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of
civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop
girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers;
artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and
drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across
the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most
noted families. To the west were apartment houses whence stiff, prim
bookkeepers, floor-walkers, clerks and small shop-keepers issued with
their families on Sundays, bound for church. There were other apartment
houses--the most of them to the south--whence in the midnight hours
came slattern servants and reckless looking girls in loose wrappers and
high-heeled slippers, pitcher in hand, bound for the nearest saloon.

After dusk from early spring until late fall a multitude of interesting
sounds mingled with the roar of the elevated trains to the west and
south and the rumble of carriages in “the Avenue” to the north. Howard,
reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young
men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the
trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came
the songs--“I want you, my honey, yes I do,” or “Lu, Lu, how I love my
Lu!”, or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures
could be seen flitting about in the shadows. Usually these figures were
in pairs; usually one was in white; usually at her waist-line there was
a black belt that continued on until it was lost in the other and darker
figure.

Scraps of a score of languages--curses, jests, terms of
endearment--would float up to him. Then came the hours of comparative
silence, with the city breathing softly and regularly, with the moon
hanging low and the pale arch rising above the dark trees like a giant
ghost. There would be an occasional drunken shout or shriek; a riotous
roar of song from some staggering reveller making company for himself on
the journey home; the heavy step of the policeman. Or perhaps the only
sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as
a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s--the tread of a lonely woman with
draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the
darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no
friends, no hope can make it.

Once he threw a silver dollar from his window to the sidewalk well in
front of her. She did not see it flash downward but she heard it ring
upon the walk. She rushed forward and twice kicked it away from her in
her frenzy to get it. When her bare hand--or was it a claw?--at last
closed upon it, she gave a low scream, looked slyly and fearfully about,
then ran as if death were at her heels.

Soon after Howard was put “on space” he took the best suite of rooms in
the house. It was a strange company which Mrs. Sands had gathered under
her roof. Except Howard there was no one, not even Mrs. Sands herself,
who did not have so much past that there was little left for future.
Indeed, perhaps none of these storm-tossed or wrecked human craft
had had more of a past than Mrs. Sands. There was no mistaking the
significance of those deep furrows filled with powder and plastered with
paint, those few hairs tinted and frizzed. But like all persons with
real pasts Mrs. Sands and her lodgers kept the veil tightly drawn. They
confessed to no yesterdays and they did not dare think of to-morrow.
They were incuriously awaiting the impulse which was sure to come, sure
to thrust them on downward.

A new lodger at Mrs. Sand’s usually took the best rooms that were to be
had. Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, came the retreat upward
until a cubby-hole under the eaves was reached. Finally came precipitate
and baggageless departure, often with a week or two of lodging unpaid.
The next pause, if pause there was, would be still nearer the river-bed
or the Morgue.

One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South,
about--three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his
sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one
stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his
door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was
“the clergyman” from up under the eaves--an unfrocked priest, thin to
emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness.
He hastily bundled the bones of two chops and a bit of bread into a
stained and torn handkerchief, and sprang away up the stairs toward his
little hole at the roof.

Howard was in a hurry and so put off for the time action upon the
natural impulse. When he came back at midnight, there was soon a knock
at his door. He opened it and invited in the man at the threshold--a
tall, strongly built, erect German, with a dissipated handsome face,
heavily scarred from university duels.

“Pardon me for disturbing you,” said the German. His speech, his tone,
his manner, left no doubt as to his breeding though they raised the
gravest doubts as to his being willing to give a true account of why he
had become a tenant in that lodging house.

“Will you have a cigarette and some whiskey?” inquired Howard.

The German’s glance lit and lingered upon the bottle of Scotch on the
table. “Concentrated, double-distilled friendship,” said he as he poured
out his drink.

“But a friend that drives all others away,” smiled Howard.

“I have found it of a very jealous disposition,” replied the German with
a careless shrug of the shoulders and a lifting of the eyebrows. “But at
least this friend has the grace to stay after it has driven the others
away.”

“To stay until the last piece of silver is gone.”

“But what more does one expect of a friend? Besides, we are overlooking
one friend--the one who helped our clerical fellow-lodger of the attic
out of his troubles to-day.”

“His luck has turned?”

“Permanently. He shot himself this afternoon.”

“And only this morning I made up my mind to try to help him,” said
Howard regretfully.

“You could not have hoped to succeed so well. His case needed something
more than temporary expedient. But, to come to the point, I had a slight
acquaintance with him. He left a note for me--mailed it just before he
shot himself. In it he asked that I insert a personal in the Herald.
Unfortunately I have not the money. I thought that you as a journalist
might be able to suggest something.”

The German held out a slip of cheap writing paper on which was written:
“Helen--when you see this it will be over--L.”

“A good story,” was Howard’s first thought, his news-instinct alert. And
then he remembered that it was not for him to tell. “I will attend to
this for you to-morrow.”

“Thank you,” said the German, helping himself to the whiskey. “Have you
seen the new lodgers?”

“Those in the room behind me? Yes. I saw them at the front door as I
came in.”

“They’re a queer pair--the youngest I’ve seen in this house. I’ve been
wondering what tempest wrecked them on this forlorn coast so early in
the voyage.”

“Why wrecked?”

“My dear sir, we are all--except you--wrecks here, all unseaworthy at
least.”

“One of them was quite pretty, I thought,” said Howard, “the slender one
with the black hair.”

“They are not mates. The other girl is of a different sort. She’s more
used to this kind of life, at least to poverty. I fancy Miss Black-Hair
looks on it as a lark. But she’ll find out the truth by the time she has
mounted another story.”

“Here, to go up means to go down,” Howard said, weary of the
conversation and wishing that the German would leave.

“They say that they’re sisters,” the German went on, again helping
himself to the whiskey; “They say they have run away from home because
of a stepmother and that they are going to earn their own living. But
they won’t. They spend the nights racing about with a gang of the young
wretches of this neighbourhood. They won’t be able to stand getting up
early for work. And then----”

The German blew out a huge cloud of cigarette smoke, shrugged his
shoulders and added: “Miss Black-Hair may get on up town presently. But
I doubt it. The Tenderloin rarely recruits from down here.”

The bottle was empty and the German bowed himself out. As the night was
hot, Howard opened the door a few moments afterward. At the other end of
the short hall light was streaming through the open door of the room the
two girls had taken. Before he could turn, there was a shadow and “Miss
Black-Hair” was standing in her doorway:

“Oh,” she began, “I thought----”

Howard paused, looking at her. She was above the medium height--tall
for a woman--and slender. Her loose wrapper, a little open at her round
throat, clung to her, attracting attention to all the lines of her form.
Her hair was indeed black, jet black, waving back from her forehead in a
line of curving and beautiful irregularity. Her skin was clear and dark.
There were deep circles under her eyes, making them look unnaturally
large, pathetically weary. In repose her face was childish and sadly
serious. When she smiled she looked older and pert, but no happier.

“I thought,” she continued with the pert, self-confident smile, “that
you were my sister Nellie. I’m waiting for her.”

“You’re in early tonight,” said Howard, the circles under her eyes
reminding him of what the German had told him.

“I haven’t slept much for a week,” the girl replied, “I’m nearly dead.
But I won’t go to bed till Nellie comes.”

Howard was about to turn when she went on: “We agreed always to stay
together. She broke it tonight. My fellow got too fresh, so I came home.
She said she’d come too. That was an hour ago and she isn’t here yet.”

“Isn’t she rather young to be out alone at this time?”

Howard could hardly have told why he continued the conversation. He
certainly would not, had she been less beautiful or less lonely and
childish. At his remark about her sister’s youth she laughed with an
expression of cunning at once amusing and pitiful.

“She’s a year older than me,” she said, “and I guess I can take care of
myself. Still she hasn’t much sense. She’ll get into trouble yet. She
doesn’t understand how to manage the boys when they’re too fresh.”

“But you do, I suppose?” suggested Howard.

“Indeed I do,” with a quick nod of her small graceful head, “I know what
I’m about. _My_ mother taught _me_ a few things.”

“Didn’t she teach your sister also?”

“Miss Black-Hair” dropped her eyes and flushed a little, looking like a
child caught in a lie. “Of course,” she said after a pause.

“How long have you been without your mother?”

“I’ve been away from home four months. But I saw her in the street
yesterday. She didn’t see me though.”

“Then you’ve got a step-father?”

“No, I haven’t. Nellie told that to Mrs. Sands. But it’s not so. You
know Nellie’s not my sister?”

“I fancied not from what you said a moment ago.”

“No, she used to be nurse girl in our family. We just say we’re sisters.
I wish she’d come. I’m tired of standing. Won’t you come in?”

She went into her room, her manner a frank and simple invitation. Howard
hesitated, then went just inside the door and half sat, half leaned upon
the high roll of the lounge. The room was cheaply furnished, the lounge
and a closed folding bed almost filling it. Upon the mantel, the bureau
and the little table were a few odds and ends that stamped it a woman’s
room. A street gown of thin pale-blue cloth was thrown over a rocking
chair. As the girl leaned back in this chair with her face framed in the
pale-blue of the gown, she looked tired and sad and beautiful and very
young.

“If Nellie doesn’t look out, I’ll go away and live alone,” she said, and
the accompanying unconscious look of loneliness touched Howard.

“You might go back home.”

“You don’t know my home or you wouldn’t say that. You don’t know my
father.” She had got upon the subject of herself, and, once in that road
she kept it with no thought of turning out. “He can’t treat me as he
treats mother. Why, he goes away and stays for days. Then he comes home
and quarrels with her all the time. They never both sit through a meal.
One or the other flares up and leaves. He generally whipped me when he
got very mad--just for spite.”

“But there’s your mother.”

“Yes. She doesn’t like my going away. But I can’t stand it. Papa
wouldn’t let me go anywhere or let anybody come to see me. He says
everybody’s bad. I guess he’s about right. Only he doesn’t include
himself.”

“You seem to have a poor opinion of people.”

“Well, you can’t blame me.” She put on her wise look of experience and
craft. “I’ve been away, living with Nellie for four months and I’ve seen
no good to speak of. A girl doesn’t get a fair chance.”

“But you’ve got work?”

“Oh, yes. We both stayed down in a restaurant, Nellie’s got a place as
waiter. That’s the best she could do. The man said I was good-looking
and would catch trade. So he made me cashier. I get six dollars a week
to Nellie’s three. But it’s a bad place. The men are always slipping
notes in my hand when they give me their checks. Then the boss, he’s
always bothering around.”

“But you don’t have to work hard?”

“From nine till four. We get our lunch free. I pay three dollars on the
room and Nellie pays one.”

If Howard had not seen many such problems in economics before, he would
have been astonished at any one even hoping to be able to get two meals
a day, clothing and carfare out of two or three dollars a week. As it
was, he only wondered how long a girl who had been used at least to
comfort would endure this. “It’s easy for the other girl,” he thought,
“because she’s used to it. But this one--” and he decided that the
“trouble” would begin as soon as her clothing was worn out.

He noticed that she was pulling at the third finger of her right hand
where she would have worn rings if she had had any. “You’ve had to pawn
your rings?” he ventured.

She looked at him startled. “Did Nellie tell you?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, “I saw that you were missing your rings and suspected
the rest.”

“Yes; that’s so. I’ve pawned all my jewelry except a bracelet. Nellie
can’t get along on her three dollars. She eats too much.”

“I should think you’d rather be at home.”

“As I told you before,” she said impatiently, “anything’s better than
home. Besides, I’m pretty well off. I go where I please, stay out as
late as I please and have all the company I want. At home I’d have to be
in bed at ten o’clock.”

There was a sound at the front door down in the darkness. The girl
started from the chair, listened, then exclaimed: “There she comes now.
And it’s two o’clock!”

Howard took the hint, smiled and said: “Well, good-night. I’ll see you
again.”

“Good-night,” the girl answered absently.

From his room Howard heard Nellie coming up the stairs. “You’re a nice
one!” came in “Miss Black-Hair’s” indignant voice, “Where have you been?
Where did you and Jack go?”

The answer came in a sob--“Oh, Alice, you’ll never forgive me!”

Their door closed upon the two girls but Howard could still hear
Nellie’s voice tearful, pleading. There was the sound of some one
falling heavily upon the lounge, then sobs and cries of “Oh! Oh!”
 As Howard went into his bedroom, he could hear the voices still more
plainly through the thin wall. He caught the words only once. “Miss
Black-Hair,” her voice shaking with anger, exclaimed: “Nellie Baker, you
are a wicked girl, I shall go away.”




V.

ALICE.

Several nights later Howard came upon Alice at the front door, where a
young man was detaining her in a lingering good-bye. Another night as
he was passing her room he saw her stretched upon the floor, her head
supported by her elbows and an open book in front of her. She looked so
childlike that Howard paused and said: “What is it--a fairy story?”

“No, it’s a love story,” she replied, just glancing at him with a faint
smile and showing that she did not wish to be interrupted. The same
night as he was going to bed he heard the angry voices of the two girls.
A week later, toward the end of July, he found Alice sitting on the
front stoop, when he came from dinner. She was obviously in the depths
of the “blues.” Her eyes, the droop of the corners of her mouth, even
the colour of her skin indicated anxiety and depression. She looked so
forlorn that he said gently: “Wouldn’t you like to walk in the Square?”

She rose at once. “Yes, I guess so.” They crossed to the green. She was
wearing the pale-blue gown and it fitted her well. Neither in the gown
nor in the big hat with its coquettish flowers nodding over the brim was
there much of fashion. But there was a certain distinction in her
walk and her manner of wearing her clothes; and to a pretty face and a
graceful form was added the charm of youth, magnetic youth.

“Do you want to walk?” she asked, lassitude in her voice.

“No, let us sit,” he said, and they went to a bench near the arch. It
was twilight. The children were still romping and shouting. Many fat
elderly women--mothers and grandmothers--were solemnly marching about,
talking in fat, elderly voices.

“You have the blues?” asked Howard, thinking it might make her feel
better to talk of her troubles. “If I were your doctor, I should
prescribe a series of good cries.”

“I don’t cry,” said the girl. “Sometimes I wish I could. Nellie cries
and gets over things. I feel awful inside and sick and my eyes burn. But
I can’t cry.”

“You’re too young for that.”

“Oh, in some ways I’m young; again, I’m not. I hate everybody this
evening.”

“What’s the matter? Has Nellie deserted you?”

“She? Not much. I had to tell her to go”--this with a joyless little
laugh--“she quit work and wouldn’t behave herself. So now I’m going on
alone.”

“And you won’t go home?”

“Never in the world,” she said with almost fierce energy; then some
thought made her laugh in the same way as before. Howard decided that
she had not told him everything about her home life, even though she had
rattled on as if there were nothing to conceal. He sat watching her, she
looking straight before her, her small bare hands clasped in her lap.
He was pitying her keenly--this child, at once stunted and abnormally
developed, this stray from one of the classes that keeps their women
sheltered; and here she was adrift, without any of those resources of
experience which assist the girls of the tenements.

Her features were small, sensitive, regular. Her eyes were brown with
lines of reddish gold raying from the pupils. Her chin and mouth were
firm enough, yet suggested weakness through the passions. Her clear
skin had the glow of youth and health upon its smooth surface. She was
certainly beautiful and she certainly had magnetism.

“What do you think is going to become of you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, after a deep sigh. “A girl doesn’t have a fair
chance. I don’t seem to be able to have any fun without getting into
trouble. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so black. I wish I was
dead.”

Her dreary tone put the deepest pathos into her words. Howard had seen
despondency in youth before--had felt it himself. But there had always
been a certain lightness in it. Here was a mere child who evidently
thought, and thought with reason, that there was no hope for her; and
her despair was not a passing cloud or storm, but a settled conviction.

“There doesn’t seem to be any chance for a young girl,” she repeated
as if that phrase summed up all that was weighing upon her. And Howard
feared that she, was right. Even the readiest of all commodities,
advice, failed him. “What can she do?” he thought. “If she has no home,
worth speaking of”--then he went on aloud:

“Haven’t you friends?”

She laughed again with that slight moving of the lips and with eyes
mirthless. “Who wants me for a friend? Nobody’d think I was respectable.
And I guess I’m not so very. There’s Nellie and her--friends. Oh, the
girls join in with the men to drag other girls down. But I won’t do
that. I don’t care what becomes of me--except that.”

“Why?” he asked, curious for her explanation of this aversion.

“I don’t know why,” she replied. “There doesn’t seem to be any good
reason. I’ve thought I would several times. And then--well, I just
couldn’t.”

Howard turned the subject and tried to draw her out of this mood. They
sat there for several hours and became well acquainted. He found that
she had an intelligent way of looking at things, that she observed
closely, and that she appreciated and understood far more than he had
expected.

It was the beginning of a series of evenings spent together. He took her
with him on many of his assignments and they often dined together at
“Le Chat Noir” or the “Restaurant de Paris,” or “The Manhattan” over
in Second Avenue. Late in June she bought a new gown--a pale-grey with
ribbons and hat to match. Howard was amused at the anxious expression
in her gold-brown eyes as she waited for his opinion. And when he said:
“Well, well, I never saw you look so pretty,” she looked much prettier
with a slight colour rising to tint the usual pallor of her cheeks.

One Sunday he came home in the afternoon and found her helping the maid
at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched
her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened
one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She
read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the
subject of political economy.

“What do you have such stupid things around for?” she said, smiling and
rising. She began to arrange the books and papers on the table. He was
looking at her but thinking of something else when he became conscious
that she had got suddenly white to the lips. He jumped to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, “are you going to faint?”

Her eyes were shining as with fever out of a ghostly face. Her lips
trembled as she answered: “Oh it’s nothing. I do this often.” She went
slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she
returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now
one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.

“I never was in here before,” she said. “You’ve got lots of pretty
things. Whose picture is this?”

“That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago.”

Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes
danced with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began
to sing and kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst
forth again. He did not even especially note the swift change, the, for
her, extraordinary mood of high spirits. It was about this time that
their relations began to change.

Howard had thought of her, or had thought that he thought of her, only
as a lonely and desolate child, to be taught so far as he was capable of
teaching and she of learning. He was conscious of her extreme youth and
of the impassable gulf of thought and taste between them. He did not
take her feelings into account at all. It never occurred to him that
this part of friend and patron which he was playing was not safe for
him, not just and right toward her.

One night he took her to a ball at the Terrace Garden--a
respectable, amusing affair “under the auspices of the
Young-German-American-Shooting-Society.” The next day a reporter for the
_Sun_ whom he knew slightly said to him with a grin he did not like:
“Mighty pretty little girl you’re taking about with you, Howard. Where’d
you pick her up?”

Howard reddened, angry with himself for reddening, angry with the _Sun_
man for his impudence, ashamed that he had put himself and Alice in such
a position. But the incident brought the matter of his relation with her
sharply and clearly before his mind and conscience.

“This must stop,” he said to himself; “it must stop at once. It is
unjust to her. And it is dragging me into an entanglement.”

But the mischief had been done. She loved him. And with the confidence
of youth and inexperience, she was disregarding all the obstacles,
was giving herself up to the dream that he would presently love her in
return, with the end as in the story books. Indeed love stories became
her constant companions. Where she once read them for amusement, she now
read them as a Christian reads his Bible--for instruction, inspiration,
faith, hope and courage.

One evening in July--it was in the week of Independence Day--Howard’s
windows and door were thrown wide to get the full benefit of whatever
stir there might be in the air. He was sprawled upon the lounge, the
table drawn close and upon it a lamp shedding a dim light through the
room but enough near by to let him read. He had dropped his book and was
thinking whether a stroll in the Square in the moonlight would repay the
trouble of moving. There were steps in the hall and then, peeping round
the door-frame was the face of his young neighbour.

“Hello,” he said, “I thought you were out somewhere. Come in.”

“No, I’m going to bed,” she answered, nevertheless gradually edging into
the room. She was wearing a loose wrapper of flowered silk, somewhat
worn and never very fine. Her black hair hung in a long thick braid to
her waist and she looked even younger than usual.

“Where have you been all evening?” asked Howard.


“Oh, I’ve been up to see a friend. She lives in Harlem, and she wants me
to come and live with her.”

“Are you going?” Howard inquired, noting that he was interested and not
pleased. “The house wouldn’t seem natural without you.”

She gave him a quick, gratified glance and, advancing further into the
room, sat upon the arm of the big rocking-chair. “She gave me a good
talking to,” she went on with a smile. “She told me I ought not to live
alone at my age. She said I ought to live with her and meet some friends
of hers. She said maybe I’d find a nice fellow to marry.”

Howard thought over this as he smoked and at last said in an
ostentatiously judicial tone: “Well, I think she’s right. I don’t see
what else there is to do. You can’t live on down here alone always.
What’s become of Nellie?”

“Nellie’s got to be a bad girl,” said Alice with a blush and a dropping
of the eyes. “She’s in Fourteenth Street every night. She says she
doesn’t care what happens to her. I saw her last night and she wanted
me to come with her. She says it’s of no use for me to put on airs. She
says I’ve got no friends and I might as well join her sooner as later.”

“Well?” Howard was keeping his eyes carefully away from hers.

“Oh, I sha’n’t go with her. As long as a girl has got anything at all
to live for, she doesn’t want that. Besides I’d rather go to the East
River.”

“Drowning’s a serious matter,” said Howard with a smile and with banter
in his tone.

“Yes, it is,” said the girl seriously, “I’ve thought of it. And I don’t
believe I could.”

“Then you’d better go with your friend and get married.”

“I don’t want to get married,” she replied, shaking her head slowly from
side to side.

“That’s what all the girls say,” laughed Howard. “But of course you
will. It’s the only thing to do.”

“Then why don’t you get married?” asked Alice, tracing one of the
flowers in her wrapper with her slim, brown forefinger.

“I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Oh, you could get a nice girl to marry you, I’m sure,” she said, the
colour rising faintly toward her long, downcast lashes.

“But who would get the money? It takes money to keep a nice girl.”

“Oh, not much,” said Alice earnestly, yet with a queer hesitation in her
voice. “You oughtn’t to marry those extravagant girls. I’ve read about
them and I think they don’t make very good wives, real wives to save
money and--and care.”

“You seem to know a good deal about these things for your age,” said
Howard, much amused and showing it.

“I don’t care,” she persisted, “you ought to get married.”

Howard felt that this was the time to clear the girl’s mind of any
“notions” she might have got. He would be very clever, very adroit. He
would not let her suspect that he had any idea of her thoughts. Indeed
he was not perfectly certain that he had. But he would gently and
frankly tell her the truth.

“I shall never get married,” he said, sitting up and talking as one who
is discussing a case which he understands thoroughly yet has no personal
interest in. “I haven’t the money and I haven’t the desire. I am what
they would call a confirmed bachelor. I wouldn’t marry any girl who
had not been brought up as I have been. We should be unhappy together
unsuited each to the other. She would soon hate me. Besides, I wish to
be free. I care more for freedom than I ever shall for any human being.
As I am now, so I shall always be, a wandering fellow without ties. It
is not a pleasant prospect for old age. But I have made up my mind to it
and I shall never marry.”

The girl’s hands had dropped limp into her lap; her face was down so
that he could barely see the burning blush which overspread it.

“You don’t mean that,” she said in a voice that was queer and choked.

“Oh yes, I do, little girl,” he answered, intending to smile when she
should look up.

When she did lift her eyes, his smile could not come. For her face was
grey and her lips bloodless and from her eyes looked despair. Howard
glanced away instantly. With rude hand he had suddenly toppled into
the dust this child’s dream-castle of love and happiness which he had
himself helped her build. He felt like a criminal. But partly from a
sense of duty, chiefly from the cowardice of self-preservation, he made
no effort to lighten her suffering.

“I should only prolong it,” he thought, “only make matters worse.
To-morrow--perhaps.”

If she had been worldly wise, even if she had not been so completely
absorbed in her worship of him that her woman-instincts were dormant,
she would herself have found hope. But she had not a suspicion that
these strong words of apparent finality were spoken to give himself
courage, to keep him from obeying the impulse to respond to the appeal
of her youth to his, her aloneness to his, her passion to his. She
believed him literally.

There was a long silence. He heard her move, heard a suppressed cry and
glanced toward her again. She was darting from the room. A second later
her door crashed. He started up and after her, hesitated, returned to
his book--but not to his reading.

Toward noon the next day, he passed her room on his way out. The
door was wide open; none of her belongings was in sight; the maid was
sweeping energetically. She paused when she saw him.

“Miss Alice left this morning,” she said, “and the room’s been let to
another party.”





VI.

IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND.


Howard could have got her new address; and for many weeks habit, at
first steadily, afterward intermittently, teased him to look her up.
He was amazed at her hold upon him. At times the longing for her was so
intense that he almost suspected himself of being in love with her.

“I escaped from that none too soon,” he congratulated himself. “It
wasn’t nearly so one-sided as I thought.”

He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate
friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked
him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled
because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him
intimately.

The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve,
friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had
been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to
others for amusement, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself.
As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as
free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.

Women there had been--several women, a succession of idealizations which
had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never
disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense.
He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his
personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said
to Alice about marriage was true--as to his intentions, at least. A poor
woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not
marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely,
never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of
any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very
corner-stone of his scheme of life.

The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other
women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat,
there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no
such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in
all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when
he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent
and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the
dissipation of mental laziness.

As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and
showed it in the most attractive of all lights.

While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the
Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions
of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night,
interested in the new phases of life--the mines and the miners, the
display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.

When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.

       *       *       *       *       *

One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading
and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was
some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search
for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice.
The door opened. It was Alice.

She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with
her--a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change
in her face--a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked
more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes
and in her smile. But--Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As
the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”

She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her
hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention.
She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.

Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you.
For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”

“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must
have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And
when I had enough to last me through the summer, I--I came.”

“You’ve been at work?”

She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously
with her ribbons.

“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low
voice; “I’m eighteen now and--well, I’m not a child.”

Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw
her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was
straight at him--appeal but also defiance.

“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I
wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others--up there. I’ve
never had--had--this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you
sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”

Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and
shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and
was smoking one of his cigarettes.

“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and
we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”

She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door.
Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms
upon his shoulder--a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of
the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her
mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her
eyes.

“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.

He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction
and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the
magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the
truth--that Alice had ended his career.

He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his
habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him
into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to
bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so
non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had
marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would,
have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will
was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the
source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared,
she proposed that they take an apartment together.

“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,”
 she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much
better off than you are now.”

He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a
mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man
and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses
for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not
speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it,
caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see
as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was
going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said
abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on
discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready
to act.

The apartment was taken in her name--Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being
necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he
as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good
taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles
and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the
arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was
sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly
false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.

After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new
experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness,
he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his
clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was
opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on
her head.

As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful,
gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very
near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that
period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives
place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection
as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in
his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there
were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should
be”--Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.

Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned
him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for
him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had
no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was
not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been
busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or
to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind
and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested
him.

No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he
found--himself.

One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: “Something
is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”

“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you
never think of getting old?”

“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to
think of that.”

“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is
unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us
to get into it.”

“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.

“But you have no friends?”

“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”

“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about
you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always
having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am
Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am
ashamed of myself.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother
about the rest of the world?”

“No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We
must--must be married.”

He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head.
A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the
meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face
upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears
before.

“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.

She shook her head in negation.

“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time
he had ever caught her in a pretense.

“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her
cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But--I--I do
not----”

“Do not--what?”

“I do not want--I will not--risk losing you.”

“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”

“Some men--yes. But not you.”

“And why not I, O Wisdom?”

“Because--because--do you think I have watched you all this time,
without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave
you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not
want to be respectable. I want--just you.”

“But are we not as good as married now?”

“Yes--that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody
until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try.
I want you as long as I can have you. And then----”

“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then,
‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like
twenty-years-old that is.”

She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember
the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”

“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.

She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I
intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I----”

Howard put his hand over her lips.

“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers.
“Only this--that I understood you then, understood just why you
would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still
I--understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me
manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all,
you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”

Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his
eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.

“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a
chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had
you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see
the real you for the first time in two years.”

“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with
a small, sly smile.

“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little
girl who used to look up to me?”

“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you
refused her, she--died.”

“Yes--we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more
convenient, let us say.”

Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his
fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day--perhaps.
But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out
here--out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and--and surely
come between us. I want no others--none.”





VII.

A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.


Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him
as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving,
he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper
which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered
why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant
spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.”
 Those who looked deeper saw the truth--a dangerous facility, a perilous
inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good
living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from
seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from
the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities
upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of
self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and
briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many
excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the
profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were
there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always
improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal
habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a
successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as
a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and
versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a
brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite
hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what
one has done but always of what one could have and should have done.
I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years.
Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason
was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He
was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her
closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments
of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came,
listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her
eyes.

He did not love her--and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in
him--and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented.
She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength
vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly
until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted
herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed
of his relation with her but--well, he never relaxed his precautions for
keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club
and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself
in a--gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with
earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most
of the time he was content--so well, so comfortably content that if his
mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form
and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality--his mental alertness. All his
life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him
from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from
plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was
now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the last day of January--six weeks after his thirtieth birthday--he
came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were
to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside
her.

“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said
with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse
and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”

“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold
the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to
see you particularly.”

He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to
Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do
the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.

“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily
and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”

Howard seemed not to understand.

“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”

“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

“At once, I tell you--at once.”

“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this
afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He
laughed strangely.

“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around.
He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it.
And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to
the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the
doctor’s assistant standing beside him.

“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few
feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard
remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”--The doctor interrupted with:
“Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.”
 But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor,
repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”

“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best
place.”

Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he
said.

“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him.
“But I saw that you weren’t--that is I couldn’t help noticing that you
and she were--And usually the man in such cases--well, my sympathy is
for the woman.”

“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates
her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive
her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her
hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard
could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with
pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine
forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her
eyes.

“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his.
“I need you. I can’t do without you.”

She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked,
“to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that
you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I--because I love
you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never
would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”

“What do you mean?”

“For nearly four years--all the years I’ve really lived--I have had only
one thought--my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say
‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she
put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they
were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But
since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go
back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted
your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour,
whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love
me?’”

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few
questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly
over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I
saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness
came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to
part this way. But I did not expect”--and she drew a long
breath--“happiness!”

“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank
in the expression of his eyes--the love, the longing, the misery--as if
it had been a draught of life.

“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long,
long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last--love!”

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you
from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was
so self-absorbed. And you--you fed my vanity, never insisted upon
yourself.”

“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to
you what I have been.”

“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that
carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”

“With this little candle? No, no, dear--_my_ dear. You will be a great
man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m
afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will
keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in
there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and
take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think--yes, I feel that--that I
shall know and thrill.”

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently
he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between
his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only
a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went
nearer.

“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red
ribbons at your neck.”

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long
streamers of blood. She was dead.






VIII.

A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.


He left her at Asheville as she wished--“where I have been happiest and
where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed
his past and made his plans for the future.

As to the past he had only one regret--that he had not learned to
appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had
been due entirely to himself--to his inertia, his willingness to seize
any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future--work, work
with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must
be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.

At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave
the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom
drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house--at their
windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she
and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her
standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black
hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to
smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his
temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.

“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”

The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”

“Yes--in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a
hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”

“The Imperial?”

“That will do--yes--go there.”

He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent
for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except
his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions--those he
could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure
the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even
Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and
tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for
two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton.
They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

“And now,” said Kittredge, “I’m my own master. Why, I can’t begin to
fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I
please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under
compulsion work.”

“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned
forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential:
“What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve
behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must
get to work, really to work.”

“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”

“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he
repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten
upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that
earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”

“Well, let’s see you work--work for something definite. Why don’t you
try for some higher place on the paper--correspondent at Washington or
London--no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even
an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought
to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides
politics.”

“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know
how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes,
although he is a free-trader.”

“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express
honest opinions.”

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he
was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the _News-Record_
and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a
great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short
editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his
article again and decided that with a few changes--adjectives cut out,
long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction
and the conclusion omitted--it would be worth handing in. With the
corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s
room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office--no carpet, three severe
chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln
on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all
parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the
editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical
face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black
but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most
conspicuous feature was his nose--long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr.
Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”

“Oh--so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be
seated?”

“Thank you--no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d
submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind,
I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”

“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to
produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know
what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and
send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and
dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it,
admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and
deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which
Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it
up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too
abstract--never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled
across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles.
Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to
paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to
it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on.
He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly,
toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to
drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward
glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil
marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little
mannerism of some woman passing him in the street--and he would be ready
to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a
vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night
and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round
his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they
seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or
die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the
use if one has not an object--a human object?”

And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses,
her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so
unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her
way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the
music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it
into words----

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his
face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.”
 And then he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up
into his throat and issuing in moans.

“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up,
ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of
this?”





IX.

AMBITION AWAKENS.


Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff;
but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to
twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the
_News-Record_ was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and
right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and
the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded
in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of
statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of
only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet
calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet
direct--these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling,
rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of
words for exact shades of meaning.

“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself
to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was
farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were
rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing.
Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him
that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my
attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work.
I’ll try a novel next.”

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if
you please.”

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge
up-piling of newspapers--the exchanges that had come in during the past
twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr.
Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make
sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously.
Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and
send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up
another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him
to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds
sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears
and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and
laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on
the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to
come up here?”

Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean----”

“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a
rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he
is going to do nothing. Will you come?”

“It is what I have been working for.”

“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into
a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up
articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it
systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in
this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”

“And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular
ambition,” Howard confessed.

“Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency.
You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent
quality--but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working
evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night
my oldest child died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my
leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master
inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re
helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

“But don’t you think that temperament----”

“Temperament--that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However,
the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an
advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average
downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just
space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of
reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end
of Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the
Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of
smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the
crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first
deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his
timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--“Poor
boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too
much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar
streets--how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with
stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces
and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd,
like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the
essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the
morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself
in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated
energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was--work, incessant, self-improving,
self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought.
“Work and sleep--the two periods of unconsciousness of self--are the two
periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no
women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away
from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from
the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of
acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which
exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the
routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing.
The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast
multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his
instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race.
This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well
acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality--but dangerous. You will
need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your
belief while you are writing--then to edit yourself in cold blood.
That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business,
politics, a profession--enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms
are confined to the important things--food, clothing and shelter. It
seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and
time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you
may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the
impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be
especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated
truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the
alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his
chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able
chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely
enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the
adulteration--the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a
critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he
learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his
ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling
the influence of his force--his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by
principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest,
intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration
and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s
crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it
with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate
easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved
and training him to deserve it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who
took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New
Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom.
Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his
seclusion.

“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said,
looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for
declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for
years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”

“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”

“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or
books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know
the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But
I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities
and wait for them to become interesting.”

“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of
life.”

“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of
relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting
gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of
realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people
are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They
are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think
there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”

“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”

Howard accepted--cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had
a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of
his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and
persistence.





X.

THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.


It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not
stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in
the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted,
fascinated by the scene--carefully-groomed men and women, the air of
gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a
glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.

“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of
a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and
luxury.”

He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about
for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the
music-alcove.

“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs.
Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what
you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”

The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen
their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers.
Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made
her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s
taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish
grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the
hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one
said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed
strong appetites--not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.

Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from
twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way
of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an
ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged
to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth
expressed decision and strong emotions.

There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was
presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor
brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank
confession that she had never in her life had an original thought
capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich,
of an “old” family--in the New York meaning of the word “old”--both by
marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because
she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable
country house.

The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was
purely personal--about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and
Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted
the intimates of these five persons.

Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the
weather.

“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You
see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly
capable to judge.”

“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”

“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the
ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You
see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines,
which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the
effect is like champagne--or rather, like the effect champagne looks as
if it ought to have.”

“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it;
you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to
her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down
slowly.

“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was
glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it
before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon
I let that stupid Englishman--Plymouth--you’ve met him? No?--Well, at
any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot
about London.”

“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”

“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s
warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”

“You are a New Yorker?”

“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at
his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here--like all New
Yorkers.”

“All?”

“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”

“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her
plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and
so caught him.

“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those
people--the masses, I think they’re called--the people who have to be
fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and--and all that.”

“The people who work, you mean?”

“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who
read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”

“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of
looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”

“What is your way?”

“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take
a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that _your_ people
don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read
newspapers.”

“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”

“What they call editorials.”

“You are an editor?”

“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”

“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.

“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In
fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest
produces dissatisfaction and regret.”

“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”

“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns,
at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and
anise seed bags and golf balls.”

“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”

“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that
all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so
get a little harmless relaxation.”

“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”

“Probably not. Neither did this--what is it here in my plate, a lamb
chop?--this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a
course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really
for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”

“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”

“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest
part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give
and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless
pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so
little.”

“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and
amused.

“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back
something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved,
or having my power or my reputation advanced.”

“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”

“Altogether?”

“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to
me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are
useful and I hate people that do useful things--in a general way, I
mean.”

“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a
smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.

“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with--well, with
unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.

“But is it that? Isn’t it just an unconscious affectation, taken up
simply because all the people about you think that way--if one can call
the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of
superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the
great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or
a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can
fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing
silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try
to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its
ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those
about one are incapable of playing any other part?”

“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give
yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”

“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of
life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and--”

“Is that important--styles, I mean?”

“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend
so much time and thought in making anything that was not important?
There is nothing more important.”

“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress
so much?”

“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women
talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men
and dress--fish and nets.”

Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.

“Do you go South next month, Marian?”

“Yes--about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby--Mr.
Berersford here--always fishes in Florida in January.”

The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of
the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of
the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good
English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and
indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.

As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the
evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”

“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I
want to go on to Edith’s.”

Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr.
Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the
answer.

“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever
one--none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular
hermit.”

“I think he’s very handsome--don’t you, Marian?”

“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.

Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was
still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he
said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever
saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she
say that was startling?”

Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great
house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.

“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time.
Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing
Miss Trevor.”

When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of
the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair
absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney
and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight
smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat
looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate
yet strong.

“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.

“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.

“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it?
And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other
isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether
he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so
excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And
the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”

“Politics is like everything else--interesting if you understand what it
is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without
a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If
they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than
they are now. But you--what have you been doing?”

“I--oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian
laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park
every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”

“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and
splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I
wish--that is, sometimes I wish--that I had learned to amuse myself in
some less violent and exhausting way.”

“Marian--I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”

Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week
Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”

“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the
others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains
or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such
way.”

“You should go about more.”

“Go--where?”

“To see people.”

“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them--all day
long.”

“Yes--but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be
amused--to dinners for instance.”

“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work
at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite
object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody.
With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is
exhausted.”

“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed
until you found out all there was, and then you’d--take to your heels.”

“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more.
Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her.
I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as
vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it.
And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”

“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to
hold?”

“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are
talking about, but through another kind--quite different. Women are
so lazy and so dependent--dependent upon men for homes, for money, for
escort even.”

Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot--at least she
moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a
shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”

“Perhaps--in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to
marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported
herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is
dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a
labour-saving device.”

Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she
said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”

“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as
self-complacent as any other man.”

They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with
her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon--the air dazzling, intoxicating.
He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall,
slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment
perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and
attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each
at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.

“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.

“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday
night.”

“Thank you,” said Howard.

Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard
wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.

       *       *       *       *       *

He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you
like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set
before them.

“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.

“Yes--so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s
marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s
generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’
But he’s a decent fellow--good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his
tastes, and nothing but money.”

Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden
consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney
asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.

“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.

“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he
bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is
full of it.”

“Full of what?”

“Of weary women--weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just
one interest and that usually small and dull--stocks or iron or real
estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English
women--stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be
interested. Their husbands bore them. So--well, what is the natural
temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”

“It’s like Paris--like France?”

“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not
fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule.”

“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood
coming out--the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they
can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it
well.”

“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman
loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed
thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée--the first temptation that had
entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following
her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she
was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of
the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true
relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for
the gap between him and Alice to close--that gap of which she was more
acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really
was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him.
Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but
neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon
a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal
masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit
of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most
alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once
appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of
the open air--of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a
cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the
sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred
window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and
freedom. And Marian was of his own kind--like the women among whom he
had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be,
but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him--a woman to
love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire
him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring
into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be
cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love
to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to
resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for
the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why
not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s
engaged--her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll
let me.” And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long
process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it--and
far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the
draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own
concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.




XI.

TRESPASSING.


For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to
the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and
went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving
nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better
success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead
of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from
the aigrette in her hat to her heels--a long, narrow, graceful figure,
dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most
intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as
if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight
hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives
and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded
crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon
found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home--in
Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.

“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his
happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”

“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made
the walk in the Park a certainty.

“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”

“I see that you don’t.”

“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you
can’t help seeing it--and don’t in the least mind?”

“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine
winter day?”

“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her
eyes.

“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a
laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”

“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. _I_ have shut out
to-morrow ever since I saw you.”

“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to
look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.

“Yes--my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is----”

“Well?”

“Your engagement, of course.”

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist
the contagion.

“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours
is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full
of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and
disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can
waive yours for the moment?”

“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”

“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not
content to have me here.”

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they
turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss
Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of
myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was
going and--didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”

“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your
universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your
brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never
wobble in your path--everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a
wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer
coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass
very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note
a little variation in your movement--a very little, and soon over. They
probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to
you--close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair
cruelly singed--and then hurried sadly away. And----”

“And--what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were
shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there
before.

“And--and----” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep
in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the
colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And--I love you.”

“Oh”--Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”

“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you--so
tall, so straight, so--so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he
laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”

“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’
silence.

“Yes--trying--or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your
way and I mine.”

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her
life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she
was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to
restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in
wonder and delighted terror.

“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.

“Because you are stronger than I--and I am afraid--yet I--well--I like
it.”

“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than
I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention
the gentleman’s name?”

“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I
did a moment ago.”

“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”

“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace
engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading
into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning--or worse?”

“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our
taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can
dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day
in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of
success as the crown.”

“But failure might come.”

“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside
thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy
each of the other and both of our great love.”

Again they were walking in silence.

“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has
come over me? But--you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish
everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”

“Oh, I’ll work--in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want.
But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I
understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing
to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger.
And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open
winter sky, here is--you.”

They were in the Avenue again--“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood
of carriages rolled about them.

“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh
Street. “You will be famous.”

“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”

“The price? But you are willing to work?”

“Work--yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect
for self-contempt--at least, I think, I hope not.”

“But why should that be necessary?”

“It may not be if I am free--free to meet every situation as it arises,
with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I
had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself--not
for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with
poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a
married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for
self-respect.”

“Of course--if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a
woman he lets her know?”

“It would be a crime not to let her know.”

“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test--if she were a woman
brought up, say, as you have been.”

“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere
incidentals?”

“How can I? Because I have known poverty--have known what it was to
look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have
been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have
seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me--yes,
and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and
self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand
it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a
sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves--well, the man does not
live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen.
No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It
is not for my kind, not for me.”

They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon’s door.

“I shall not come in this afternoon,” he said. “But to-morrow--if I
don’t come in to-day, don’t you think it will be all right for me to
come then?”

“I shall expect you,” she said.

The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat.
She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her
desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly
at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.

“You are a traitor,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the
desk. “But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that
for which she is willing to pay?”




XII.

MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.


To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers
or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that
made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.

His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had
given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great
fortune. His favourite maxim was, “Always look for motives.” And he once
summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: “I often wake at
night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds,
scheming to get something out of me for nothing.”

There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator.
Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy
by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and
incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter
incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he
might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s
self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has
a possession that is all but universally coveted--wealth or position or
power or beauty.

Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she
perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else
of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness,
his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his
narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities--his kindness of heart,
his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense
of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had
much in common--the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and
the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting.
He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England
and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She
undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and
bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.

One day--it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her--they were
“in at the death” together after a run across a stiff country that
included several dangerous jumps. “You’re the only one that can keep
up with me,” he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes,
her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or
dared to ride.

“You mean you are the only one who can keep up with _me,_” she laughed,
preparing for what his face warned her was coming.

“No I don’t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up
with each other. You won’t say no, will you?”

Marian was liking him that day--he was looking his best. She
particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had
intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said:
“No--which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we
mustn’t disappoint them.”

The fact that “everybody” did expect it, the fact that he was the great
“catch” in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year,
his good looks and his good character--these were her real reasons,
with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At
twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most
deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity.
Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for
the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full
of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.

But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom.
She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her
prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative,
ambitious. Until she “came out” she had spent much time among books; but
as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it
only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of
achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it
was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the
routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional
ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement
became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.

“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment
upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you
want?”

“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “What _do_ I want?
I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be
something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel
like running away--away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting
second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did
when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt
crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me
furious.”

Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting
the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t
suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are
yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”

“That’s just it,” answered Marian indignantly. “I have always been
swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I
think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man.
I’m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome.”

It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the
engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.

Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a
mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in
“The Valley.” He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement
would be announced, and the wedding would be in May--such was the
arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and
at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted
enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential
points.

“A month’s holiday,” was his comment. They were alone on the second seat
of George Browning’s coach, driving through the Park. “If we were like
those people”--he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by
side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and
obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious
amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow
them with her eyes after the coach had passed.

“Is he kissing her?” asked Howard.

“No--not yet. But I’m sure he will as soon as we have turned the
corner.” She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead
and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its
effective framing of fur.

“But we are not----” She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost
sad. “We are not like them.”

“Oh, yes we are. But--we fancy we are not. We’ve sold our birthright,
our freedom, our independence for--for----”

“Well--what?”

“Baubles--childish toys--vanities--shadows. Doesn’t it show what
ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most
valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true
valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in
the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship
Mother Earth?”

“But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not,
last. If we--if we were like those people on the bench back there, we’d
go on and--and spoil it all.”

“Perhaps--who can say? But in some circumstances couldn’t I make you
just as happy as--as some one else could?”

“Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you
could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would
always be--be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn’t we?”

Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and
sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. “That being the case,” he said,
“let us--let us make the record one that will not be forgotten--soon.”

During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in
arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings.
They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any
convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot “on the
line.” Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of
concentration He practically took a month’s holiday from the office.
He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in
making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation
with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future.
They lived in the present, talked of the present.

One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.

“I did not know that,” he said. “But then what do I know about you in
relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of
creation.”

“You must tell me about yourself.” She was looking at him, surprised.
“Why, I know nothing at all about you.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know--all that is
important.”

“What?” She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.

“That I love you--you--all of you--all of you, with all of me.”

Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: “No, we
haven’t time to get acquainted--at least not to-day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was
going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had
asked this of her point-blank.

“You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl,
Marian,” Mrs. Carnarvon replied.

“I can’t find it in my heart to blame you for what you’re doing. The
fact that I haven’t even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your
little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also.”

“You needn’t disturb yourself, as you know,” Marian said gaily. “I’m not
hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until--after it’s all over.
Perhaps not then.”

He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat
near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa.
She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier
mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of
the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided
all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both
thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little
clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the
quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:

“I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes--giving you up;
for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who
offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can’t trust myself.
The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had
found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the
ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up
to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and
conducted for you--well, it might have been different.”

“You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the
curse of ambition. It is the passion for freedom. It would be madness
for you, thinking as you do, even if you could--and you can’t.”

He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.

“Good night,” she said at last, putting her hand in his. “Of course I
am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a
dream,”--she looked up at him smiling--“all in a moment.”

“Good night,” he smiled back at her. “I shall not open ‘the fiddler’s
bill’ until--until I have to.” At the door he turned. She had risen and
was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her
hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.

“May I kiss you?” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.

He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the
edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face
was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an
hour later she heard the bell ring--it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to
see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and
up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly
upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died
out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get
ready for bed.

“No,” she said aloud. “It isn’t ambition and it isn’t lack of love.
It’s a queer sort of cowardice; but it’s cowardice for all that. He’s
a coward or he wouldn’t have given up. But--I wonder--how am I going to
live without him? I need him--more than he needs me, I’m afraid.”

She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of
Danvers--handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked
at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it
over upon its face.





XIII.

RECKONING WITH DANVERS.


On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a
husband in prospect.

The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at
Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow
storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon
spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except
Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform.
Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of
the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly
upon her cheek.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.

“There’s nobody about,” Danvers said, reassuringly. But he acted upon
the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.

“Did you miss me?” he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his
frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of “treason”
 past and to come.

“Did _you_ miss _me_?” she evaded.

“I would have returned long ago if I had not been ashamed,” he answered,
smiling. “I never thought that I should come not to care for as good
shooting as that. You almost cost me my life.”

“Yes?” Marian spoke absently. She was absorbed in her mental comparison
of the two men.

“I got away from the others and was looking at your picture. They
started up a lion and he came straight at me from behind. If he hadn’t
made a misstep in his hurry and loosened a stone, I guess he would have
got me. As it was, I got him.”

“You mean your gun got him.”

“Of course. You don’t suppose I tackled him bare-handed.”

“It might have been fairer. I don’t see how you can boast of having
killed a creature that never bothered you, that you had to go thousands
of miles out of your way to find, and that you attacked with a gun,
giving him no chance to escape.”

“What nonsense!” laughed Danvers. “I never expected to hear you say
anything like that. Who’s been putting such stuff into your head?”

Marian coloured. She did not like his tone. She resented the suggestion
of the truth that her speech was borrowed. It made her uncomfortable to
find herself thus unexpectedly on the dangerous ground.

“I suppose it must have been that newspaper fellow Mrs. Carnarvon has
taken up. She talked about him for an hour after you left us to go to
bed last night.”

“Yes, it was--was Mr. Howard.” Marian had recovered herself. “I want you
to meet him some time. You’ll like him, I’m sure.”

“I doubt it. Mrs. Carnarvon seemed not to know much about him. I suppose
he’s more or less of an adventurer.”

Marian wondered if this obvious dislike was the result of one of those
strange instincts that sometimes enable men to scent danger before any
sign of it appears.

“Perhaps he is an adventurer,” she replied. “I’m sure I don’t know. Why
should one bother to find out about a passing acquaintance? It is enough
to know that he is amusing.”

“I’m not so sure of that. He might make off with the jewels when you had
your back turned.”

As soon as she had made her jesting denial of her real lover Marian was
ashamed of herself. And Danvers’ remark, though a jest, cut her. “What
I said about a passing acquaintance was not just or true,” she said
impulsively and too warmly. “Mr. Howard is not an adventurer. I admire
and like him very much indeed. I’m proud of his friendship.”

Danvers shrugged his shoulders and looked at her suspiciously.

“You saw a good deal of this--this friend of yours?” he demanded, his
mouth straightening into a dictatorial line.

At this Marian grew haughty and her eyes flashed: “Why do you ask?” she
inquired, her tone dangerously calm.

“Because I have the right to know.” He pointed to the diamond on her
third finger.

“Oh--that is soon settled.” Marian drew off the ring and held it out to
him. “Really, Teddy, I think you ought to have waited a little longer
before insisting so fiercely on your rights.”

“Don’t be absurd, Marian.” Danvers did not take the ring but fixed his
eyes upon her face and changed his tone to friendly remonstrance. “You
know the ring doesn’t mean anything. It’s your promise that counts. And
honestly don’t you think your promise does give me the right to ask you
about your new friends when you speak of them, of one of them, in--in
such a way?”

“I don’t intend to deceive you,” she said, turning the ring around
slowly on her finger. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I suppose the only
way to speak is just to speak.”

“Do you think you are in love with this man, Marian?”

She nodded, then after a long pause, said, “Yes, Teddy, I love him.”

“But I thought----”

“And so did I, Teddy. But he came, and I--well I couldn’t help it.”

As he did not speak, she looked at him. His face was haggard and white
and in his eyes which met hers frankly there was suffering.

“It wasn’t my fault, Teddy,” Marian laid her hand on his arm, “at least,
not altogether. I might have kept away and I didn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. I blame him.”

“But it wasn’t his fault. I--I--encouraged him.”

“Did he know that we were engaged?”

“Yes,” reluctantly.

“The scoundrel! I suspected that he was rotten somewhere.”

“You are unjust to him. I have not told you properly.”

“Did he tell you that he cared for you?”

“Yes--but he didn’t try to get me to break my engagement.”

“So much the more a scoundrel, he. Tell me, Marian--come to your senses
and tell me--what in the devil did he hang about you for and make love
to you, if he didn’t want to marry you? Would an honest man, a decent
man, do that?”

Marian’s face confessed assent.

“I should think you would have seen what sort of a fellow he is. I
should think you would despise him.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that I ought to. But I always end by despising
myself--and--and--it makes no difference in the way I feel toward him.”

“I think I would do well to look him up and give him a horse-whipping.
But you’ll get over him, Marian. I am astonished at your cousin. How
could she let this go on? But then, she’s crazy about him too.”

Marian smiled miserably. “I’ve owned up and you ought to congratulate
yourself on so luckily getting rid of such an untrustworthy person as
I.”

“Getting rid of you?” Danvers looked at her defiantly. “Do you think I’m
going to let you go on and ruin yourself on an impulse? Not much! I hold
you to your promise. You’ll come round all right after you’ve been away
from this fellow for a few days. You’ll be amazed at yourself a week
from now.”

“You don’t understand, Teddy.” Marian wished him to see once for all
that, whatever might be the future for her and Howard, there was no
future for her and him. “Don’t make it so hard for me to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about it now, Marian. I can’t stand it--I
hardly know what I’m saying--wait a few days--let’s go on as we have
been--here they come.”

The others of the party came bustling into the car and the train
started. For the rest of the journey Danvers avoided her, keeping to the
smoking room and the game of poker there. Marian could neither read nor
watch the landscape. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that
she had told him. She hated to think that she had inflicted pain and she
could not believe, in spite of what she had seen in his eyes, that his
feeling in the matter was more than jealousy and wounded vanity.

“He doesn’t really care for me,” she thought. “It’s his pride that is
hurt. He will flare out at me and break it off. I do hope he’ll get
angry. It will make it so much easier for me.”

Late in the afternoon she took Mrs. Carnarvon into her confidence. “I’ve
told Teddy,” she said.

“I might have known!” exclaimed her cousin. “What on earth made you do
that?”

“I don’t know--perhaps shame.”

“Shame--trash! Your life is going to be a fine turmoil if you run to
Teddy with an account of every little mild flirtation you happen
to have. Of all the imbeciles, the most imbecile is the woman who
confesses.”


“But how could I marry him when----”

“When you don’t love him?”

“No--I might have done that. I like him. But, when I love another man.”

“It does make a difference. But you ought to be able to foresee that
you’ll get over Howard in a few weeks----”

“Precisely what Teddy said.”

“Did he? I’m surprised at his having so much sense. For, if you’ll
forgive me, I don’t think Teddy will ever set New York on fire--at
least, he’s--well, he has the makings of an ideal husband. And has he
broken it off?”

“No. He wouldn’t have it.”

“Really? Well he _is_ in love. Most men in his position--able to get any
girl he wants--would have thrown up the whole business. Yes, he must be
awfully in love.”

“Do you think that?” Marian’s voice spoke distress but she felt only
satisfaction. “Oh, I hope not--that is, I’d like to think he cared a
great deal and at the same time I don’t want to hurt him.”

“Don’t fret yourself about these two men. Just go on thinking as you
please. You’ll be surprised how soon Howard will fade.” Mrs. Carnarvon
smiled satirically at some thought--perhaps a memory. “You’re a good
deal of a goose, my dear, but you are a great deal more of a woman.
That’s why I feel sure that Teddy will win.”

With such an opportunity--with the field clear and the woman
half-remorseful over her treachery, half-indignant at the man who had
shown himself so weak and spiritless--a cleverer or a less vain man than
Danvers would have triumphed easily. And for the first week he did make
progress. He acted upon the theory that Marian had been hypnotized and
that the proper treatment was to ignore her delusion and to treat her
with assiduous but not annoying consideration. He did not pose as an
injured or jealous lover. He was the friend, always at her service,
always thinking out plans for her amusement. He made no reference to
their engagement or to Howard.

Several people of their set were at the hotel and Marian was soon
drifting back into her accustomed modes of thought. The wider horizon
which she fancied Howard had shown her was growing dim and hazy. The
horizon which he had made her think narrow was beginning again to
seem the only one. This meant Danvers; but he was not acute enough to
understand her and to follow up his advantage.

One morning as he was walking up and down under the palms, waiting for
Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian, Mrs. Fortescue called him. She was a cold,
rather handsome woman. In her eyes was the expression that always
betrays the wife or the mistress who loathes the man she lives with,
enduring him only because he gives her that which she most wants--money.
She had one fixed idea--to marry her daughter “well,” that is, to money.

“Can you join us to-day, Teddy?” she asked. “We need one more man.”

“I’m waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian,” he explained.

“Oh, of course.” Mrs. Fortescue smiled. “What a nice girl she is--so
clever, so--so independent. I admired her immensely for deciding to
marry that poor, obscure young fellow. I like to see the young people
romantic.”

Danvers flushed angrily and pulled at his mustache. He tried to smile.
“We’ve teased her about it a good deal,” he said, “but she denies it.”

“I suppose they aren’t ready to announce the engagement yet,” Mrs.
Fortescue suggested. “I suppose they are waiting until he betters
his position a little. It’s never a good idea to have too long a time
between the announcement and the marriage.”

“Perhaps that is it.” Danvers tried to look indifferent but his eyes
were sullen with jealousy.

“I always rather thought that you and Marian were going to make a match
of it,” continued Mrs. Fortescue. Just then her daughter came down the
walk. She was fashionably dressed in white and blue that brought out all
the loveliness of her golden hair and violet eyes and faintly-coloured,
smooth fair skin. Danvers had not seen her since she “came out,” and was
dazzled by her radiance.

They say that every man must be a little in love with every pretty
woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She
sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence,
purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against
Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she
had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and
importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them
tardily, after having made an arrangement with the Fortescues for the
next day.

That evening he danced several times with Ellen Fortescue and adopted
the familiar lover’s tactics--he set about making Marian jealous. He
scored the customary success. When she went to bed she lay for several
hours looking out into the moonlight, raging against the Fortescues and
against Danvers. The mere fact that a man whom she regarded as hers was
permitting himself to show marked attention to another woman would have
been sufficient. But in addition, Marian was perfectly aware of the
material advantages of this particular man. She did not want to marry
him; at least she was of that mind at the moment. But she might change
her mind. Certainly, if there was to be any breaking off, she wished
it to be of her doing. She did not fancy the idea of him departing
joyfully.

She was far too wise to show that she saw what was going on. She praised
Miss Fortescue to Danvers with apparent frankness and insisted on him
devoting more time to her. Danvers persisted in his scheme boldly for a
week and then, just as Marian was despairing and was casting about for
another plan of campaign, he gave in. They were sitting apart in the
shadow near one of the windows of the ball-room. He had been sullen all
the evening, almost rude.

“How much longer are you going to keep me in suspense?” he burst out
angrily.

“In suspense?”

“You know what I mean. I think I’ve been very patient.”

“You mean our engagement?” Marian was looking at him, repelled by his
expression, his manner, the tone of his voice, his whole mood.

“Yes--I want your decision.”

“I have not changed.”

“You still love that--that newspaper fellow?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Marian felt her irritation against Danvers
suddenly vanish and in its place a Sense of relief and of calmness. “I
mean toward you. It won’t do, Teddy. We shall get on well as friends.
But I can’t think of you in--in that way.”

Mrs. Fortescue had so swollen his vanity that he was astounded at
Marian’s decision. He rapidly went over in his mind all the advantages
he offered as a husband, and then looked at her as if he thought her
beside herself.

“Look here, Marian,” he protested. “You can’t mean it. Why, it’s all
settled that we are to marry. It would be madness for you to break
it off. I can give you everything--everything. And he can’t give you
anything.” Then with fatal tactlessness: “He won’t even give you the
little that he can, according to your own story.”

“Yes, it’s madness, isn’t it, Teddy, to refuse you--fascinating you,
who can give everything. But that’s just it. You have too much. You
overwhelm me. I should feel like a cheat, taking so much and giving so
little.”

“Don’t,” he begged, his self-complacence and superiority all gone.
“Don’t mind my blundering, please, dear. I want you. I can’t say it. I
haven’t any gift of words. But you’ve known me all my life and you know
that I love you. I’ve set my heart on it, Mary Ann,”--it was the name
he used to tease her with when they were children playing together--“You
won’t go back on me now, will you?”

“I wish I could do as you wish, Teddy.” Marian was forgetful of
everything but the unhappiness she was causing this friend of so many,
many years and of so many, many memories. “But I can’t--I can’t.”

“Marry me, dear, anyhow. You will care afterward.” Marian was silent and
Danvers hoped. “You know all about me. I’ll not give you any surprises.
I shan’t bother you. And I’ll make you happy.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You mustn’t ask it. I’ll tell you why. I have
thought of marrying you regardless of this. Only last night I thought of
it--finally, went over the whole thing. Listen, Teddy--if I were married
to you--and if he should come--and he would come sooner or later--if
he should come and say ‘Come with me,’--I’d go--yes, I’m sure I’d go.
I can’t explain why. But I know that nothing would stand in the
way--nothing.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Marian shrank from him. She was
horrified by the malignant fury that sparkled in his eyes and raged in
his voice. “That damned scoundrel is worthy of you and you of him. But
I’ll get you yet. I never was crossed in anything in my life and I’ll
not be beaten here.”

“And I thought you were my friend!” Marian was looking at him, pale, her
eyes wide with amazement. “Is it really you?”

He laughed insolently. “Yes--you’ll see. And he’ll see. I’ll crush him
as if he were an egg shell. And as for you--you perjurer--you liar!”

He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat
rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was
not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She
remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her,
at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion.
She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a
degradation far greater than his insulting words.

She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in
a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door
closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically.
She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.

“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Mrs. Carnarvon’s voice had lost its wonted
levity. “I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and
I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do
anything?”

Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. “Oh,
I feel so unclean,” she said. “It was--Teddy. Would you believe it,
Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he
was not my friend--that he didn’t even love me--that he--oh, I shall
never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a--like a
_thing_.”

Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. “Of course Teddy’s a brute,” she said.
“I thought you knew. He’s a domesticated brute, like most of the men and
some of the women. You’ll have to get used to that.”

By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward
curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:

“Oh, I know all that. But I didn’t expect it from Teddy--and toward me.
And--” she shuddered--“I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying
him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!”

“And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in
the way he calls love. There isn’t any love that has friendship in it.”

“We must go away at once.”

“Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he
will.”

“Jessie, he hates me and--and--Mr. Howard.”

“So you talked to him about Howard again, did you?” Mrs. Carnarvon
was indignant. “You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry
frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running
amuck.”

“He said he would crush Howard. And I believe he really meant it.”

“Teddy is a man who believes in revenges--or thinks he does. His father
taught him to keep accounts in grievances, and no doubt he has opened an
account with Howard. But don’t be disturbed about it. His father would
have insisted on balancing the account. Teddy will just keep on hating,
but won’t do anything. He’s not underhanded.”

“He’s everything that is vile and low.”

“You’re quite mistaken, my dear. He’s what they call a manly fellow--a
little too masculine perhaps, but----”

A knock interrupted and Mrs. Carnarvon, answering it, took from the
bell-boy a note for Marian who read it, then handed it to her. Mrs.
Carnarvon read: “I apologise for the way I said what I did this evening,
not for what I said. Because you had forgotten yourself, had played the
traitor and the cheat was, perhaps, no excuse for my rudeness. You have
fallen under an evil influence. I hope no harm will come to you, for I
can’t get over my feeling for you. But I have done my best and have not
been able to save you. I am going away early in the morning.

“E. D.”

“Melodramatic, isn’t it?” laughed Mrs. Carnarvon. “So he’s off. How
furious Martha Fortescue and Ellen will be. But they’ll go in pursuit,
and they’ll get him. A man is never so susceptible as when he’s
broken-hearted. Well, I must go. Good-night, dear. Don’t mope and whine.
Take your punishment sensibly. You’ve learned something--if it’s only
not to tell one man how much you love another.”

“I think I’ll go abroad with Aunt Retta next month.”

“A good idea--you’ll forget both these men. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” answered Marian dolefully, expecting to resume her
thoughts of Danvers. But, instead, he straightway disappeared from
her mind and she could think only of Howard. She was free now. The one
barrier between him and her of which she had been really conscious was
gone. And her heart began to ache with longing for him. Why had he not
written? What was he doing? Did he really love her or was his passion
for her only a flash of a strong and swift imagination?

No, he loved her--she could not doubt that. But she could not understand
his conduct. She felt that she ought to be very unhappy, yet she was
not. The longer she thought of him and the more she weighed his words
and looks, the stronger became her trust in him. “He loves me,” she
said. “He will come when he can. It may be even harder for him than for
me.”

And so, explanation failing--for she rejected every explanation that
reflected upon him--she hid and excused him behind that familiar refuge
of the doubting, mystery.




XIV.

THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR.


A few minutes after leaving Marian that last night at Mrs. Carnarvon’s,
Howard was deep in a mood of self-contempt. He felt that he had faced
the crisis like a coward. He despised the weakness which enfeebled him
for effort to win her and at the same time made it impossible for him to
thrust her from his mind.

In the working hours his will conquered with the aid of fixed habit and
he was able to concentrate upon his editorials. But in his rooms, and
especially after the lights were out, his imagination became master,
deprived him of sleep and occasionally lifted him to a height of hope
in order that it might dash him down the more cruelly upon the rocks of
fact.

At last he was forced to face the situation--in his own evasive fashion.
It was impossible to go back. That loneliness which often threatened him
after Alice’s death had become the permanent condition of his life. “I
will work for her,” he said. “Until I have made a place for her I dare
not claim her. So much I will concede to my weakness. But when I have
won a position which reasonably assures the future, I shall claim
her--no matter what has happened in the meanwhile.”

He would have smiled at this wild resolution had he been in a less
distracted state of mind or had he been dealing with any other than a
matter of love. But in the circumstances it gave him heart and set him
to work with an energy and effectiveness which still further increased
Mr. Malcolm’s esteem for him.

“Will you dine with me at the Union Club on Wednesday?” Mr. Malcolm
asked one morning in mid-February. “Mr. Coulter and Mr. Stokely are
coming. I want you to know them better.”

Howard accepted and wondered that he took so little interest.
For Stokely and Coulter were the principal stockholders of the
_News-Record_, and with Malcolm formed the triumvirate which directed it
in all its departments. Mr. Malcolm held only a few shares of stock,
but received what was in the newspaper-world an immense salary--thirty
thousand a year. He was at once an able editor and an able diplomatist.
He knew how to make the plans of his two associates conform to
conditions of news and policy--when to let them use the paper, or,
rather, when to use the paper himself for their personal interests; when
and how to induce them to let the paper alone. Through a quarter of a
century of changing ownerships Malcolm had persisted, chiefly because
he had but one conviction--that the post of editor of the _News-Record_
exactly suited him and must remain his at any sacrifice of personal
character.

Howard had met Stokely and Coulter. He liked Stokely who was owner of a
few shares more than one-third; he disliked Coulter who owned just under
one-half.

Stokely was a frank, coarse, dollar-hunter, cheerfully unscrupulous in a
large way, acute, caring not at all for principles of any kind, letting
the paper alone most of the time because he was astute enough to know
that in his ignorance of journalism he would surely injure it as a
property.

Coulter was a hypocrite and a snob. Also he fancied he knew how to
conduct a newspaper. He was as unscrupulous as Stokely but tried to mask
it.

When Stokely wished the _News-Record_ to advocate a “job,” or steal, or
the election of some disreputable who would work in his interest,
he told Malcolm precisely what he wanted and left the details of the
stultification to his experienced adroitness. When Coulter wished
to “poison the fountain of publicity,” as Malcolm called the paper’s
departures from honesty and right, he approached the subject by stealth,
trying to convince Malcolm that the wrong was not really wrong, but was
right unfortunately disguised.

He would take Malcolm into his confidence by slow and roundabout
steps, thus multiplying his difficulties in discharging his “duty.” If
Coulter’s son had not been married to Malcolm’s daughter, it is probable
that not even his complete subserviency would have enabled him to keep
his place.

“If you had told me frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr.
Coulter,” he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter’s
Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm’s having to “flop” the
paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, “we
would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public
is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your
stealthiness has made the ass bray at us instead of with and for us.
And that is dangerous when you consider that running a newspaper is like
running a restaurant--you must please your customers every day afresh.”

Coulter was further difficult because of his anxieties about social
position for himself and his family. He was disturbed whenever the
_News-Record_ published an item that might offend any of the people
whose acquaintance he had gained with so much difficulty, and for
whose good will he was willing to sacrifice even considerable
money. Personally, but very privately, he edited the _News-Record’s_
“fashionable intelligence” columns on Sunday and made them an exhibit of
his own sycophancy and snobbishness which excited the amused disgust of
all who were in the secret.

Malcolm liked Howard, admired him, in a way envied his fearlessness, his
earnestness for principles. For years he had had it in mind to retire
and write a history of the Civil War period which had been his own
period of greatest activity and most intimate acquaintance with the
behind-the-scenes of statecraft. Howard’s energy, steady application,
enthusiasm for journalism and intelligence both as to editorials and as
to news made Malcolm look upon him as his natural successor.

“I think Howard is the man we want,” he said to his two associates when
he was arranging the dinner. “He has new ideas--just what the paper
needs. He is in touch with these recent developments. And above all he
has judgment. He knows what not to print, where and how to print what
ought to be printed. He is still young and is over-enthusiastic. He has
limitations, but he knows them and he is eager and capable to learn.”

It was a “shop” dinner, Howard doing most of the talking, led on by
Malcolm. The main point was the “new journalism,” as it was called, and
how to adapt it to the _News-Record_ and the _News-Record_ to it.

Malcolm kept the conversation closely to news and news-ideas, fearing
that, if editorial policies were brought in, Howard would make “breaks.”
 He soon saw that his associates were much impressed with Howard, with
his judgment, with his knowledge of the details of every important
newspaper in the city, with his analysis of the good and bad points in
each.

“I’ll drop you at your corner,” said he to Howard at the end of the
dinner. As they drove up the Avenue he began: “How would you like to be
the editor of the _News-Record_? My place, I mean.”

“I don’t understand,” Howard answered, bewildered.

“I am going to retire at once,” Malcolm went on. “I’ve been at it nearly
fifty years--ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I’ve been in charge
there almost a quarter of a century. I think I’ve earned a few years of
leisure to work for my own amusement. I’m pretty sure they’ll want you
to take my place. Would you like it?”

“I’m not fit for it,” Howard said, and he meant it. “I’m only an
apprentice. I’m always making blunders--but I needn’t tell you about
that.”

“You can’t say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the
question is not, are _you_ fit? but, is there any one more fit than you?
I confess I don’t see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the
paper all of the best that there is in him.”

“Of course I’d like to try. I can only fail.”

“Oh, you won’t fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and
Coulter--especially Coulter. In fact, I’m sure you’ll quarrel with
them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you’ll probably win out.
Only----”

Malcolm hesitated, then went on:

“I stopped giving advice years ago. But I’ll venture a suggestion.
Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it
would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue.
Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly
and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere
prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right
ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don’t
strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making
yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem
of no consequence the next morning but one after the election.”

“I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been
trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil,
what you now put into words. But there is something in me--an instinct,
perhaps--that forces me on in spite of myself. I’ve learned to curb and
guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn
to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own
lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I
feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger,
more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I
should fail miserably. I should be lost, compassless, rudderless. I have
often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow
but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad
mess of my career.”

As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see
that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms
at “sentimental bosh.” But instead, Malcolm’s face was melancholy; and
his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just
starting where he had started so many years ago:

“No doubt you are right. I’m not intending to try to dissuade you
from--from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution,
self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other
side--these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action.
All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly.
Its folly remains its essential characteristic.”

Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the _News-Record_.
His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting
upon Malcolm’s advice, gave him a “free hand” for one year. They agreed
not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits
showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.

The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the
office, read among the “Incidents in Society:”

Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed
in the _Campania_ yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport
season.





XV.

YELLOW JOURNALISM.


While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three
hundred thousand copies, the _News-Record_--the best-written, the most
complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the
most accurate--circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday
edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two
other newspapers had almost half a million.

The theory of the _News-Record_ staff was that their journal was too
“respectable,” too intelligent, to be widely read; that the “yellow
journals” grovelled, “appealed to the mob,” drew their vast crowds by
the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the
_News-Record’s_ smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from
vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the
popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.

Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was
democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his
sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of
the “yellow journals” with the most intelligent, alert and progressive
public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be
in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste.
He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of
satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of
satisfying the demands of the public.

He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk
in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff.
But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose coöperation
was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he
retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship
one of the young reporters--Frank Cumnock.

He chose Cumnock for this position, in many respects the most important
on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of
good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood
and, finally and chiefly, because he had a “news-sense,” keener than
that of any other man on the paper.

For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East
Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two
weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. Cumnock persuaded
Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days’ work he heard of a
deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat
overlooking the back windows of Thayer’s house. He had a trying struggle
with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the
afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been
able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the
Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again
and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description
Cumnock got upon the track of Thayer’s niece and her husband, found the
proof of their guilt, had them watched until the _News-Record_ came out
with the “beat,” then turned them over to the police.

Also, Cumnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in
obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He
found in the New England edition of _The World_ a six-line item giving
an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City
Editor to assign him to go there; and within a week the press of the
entire country was discussing the _News-Record’s_ exposure of the
barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and
his keepers.

“We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news,”
 Howard said to Cumnock. “They’ve put you here because, so they tell me,
you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised.
And I assure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to
anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The
only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true?
Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish
anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?”

“Is that ‘straight’?” asked Cumnock. “No favourites? No suppressions? No
exploitations?”

“‘Straight’--‘dead straight’! And if I were you I’d make this
particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If
anybody”--with stress upon the anybody--“comes to you about this, send
him to me.”

Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found
that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and
cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.

“We look too dull,” King began when Howard asked him if he had any
changes to suggest. “We need more and bigger headlines, and we need
pictures.”

“That is it!” Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in
perfect accord. “But we must not have pictures unless we can have the
best. Just at present we can’t increase expenses by any great amount.
What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger
headlines and plenty of leads?”

“I’m sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the
appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”

“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that
phrase--‘our class of readers’--much longer. Our paper should interest
every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s
audience should be like that of a good play--the orchestra chairs full
and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an
‘organ’ any longer?”

“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that
we’re free to print the news?”

“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor
Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social
connections. We are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing
but the news.”

Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched
fingers. “Hum--hum,” he said. “This _is_ news. Well--the circulation’ll
go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”

Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of
exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made
his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came
to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he
had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of
the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive
opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the
hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished
to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria--the mad rush for sensation
and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and
counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which
the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the
paper look like a series of disordered dreams.

He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for
which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted,
was--results.

The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six
years, his weekly “night off” and his two weeks’ vacation in summer
excepted, had “made up” the paper--that is to say, had defined, with the
advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of
the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous
conservative. He believed that an editor’s duty was done when he had
intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the
reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect
with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to
be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with
Howard’s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a
democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it
to read, and so to lead it to think.

“We’re on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the ‘yellow journals’
for the pennies of the mob,” he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King,
one afternoon just as Howard joined them.

Howard laughed. “Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in
the gutter, actually scuffling.”

“Well, I’m frank to say that I don’t like it. A newspaper ought to
appeal to the intelligent.”

“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.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t like it. It isn’t very big--only about
eight thousand a year--some years not so much. But then, if anything
happened--we could be--we could live.”

Howard smiled as he looked at her--but not with his eyes.

“I’m glad,” he said. “It makes me feel safer in several ways. And I’m
especially glad that it is not larger than mine. I know it’s stupid, as
so many of our instincts are; but I should not like to marry a woman who
had a larger income than I could earn. I think it is the only remnant
I have of the ‘lord and master’ idea that makes so many men ridiculous.
But we need not let that bother us. Fate has made us about equal in this
respect, so unimportant yet so important; and we are each independent of
the other. Each will always know that love is the only bond that holds
us together.”

They decided that they would live at the rate of about fifteen thousand
a year and would put by the rest of their income. She was to undertake
the entire management of their home, he transferring his share by check
each month.

“And so,” she said, “we shall never have to discuss money matters.”

“We couldn’t,” laughed Howard. “I don’t know anything about them and
could not take part in a discussion.”

As they were to be married in November, they planned to take an
apartment when Marian came back to town--in late September. She was to
attend to the furnishing and all was to be in readiness by the time they
were married. Howard was to get a six weeks’ vacation and, as soon as
they returned, they were to go to housekeeping.

Her visit to the _News-Record_ office had made a change in her.
Until she met Howard, she had known only the world-that-idles and
the world-that-drudges. Howard brought her the first real news of the
world-that-works. Of course she knew that there was such a world, but
she had confused it with the world-that-drudges. She liked to hear
Howard talk about his world, but she thought that his enthusiasm blinded
him to the truth of its drudgery; and she often caught herself half
regretting that he had to work.

But that vast machine for the swift collecting and distributing of the
news of the world had opened her eyes, had made her see her lover and,
through him, his life, in a different aspect. She had accepted the
supercilious, thoughtless opinion of those about her that the newspaper
is a mere purveyor of inaccurate gossip. And while Howard had tried to
show her his profession as it was, he had only succeeded in convincing
her that he himself had an exalted view of it; a view which she thought
creditable to him but wide of the disagreeable truth.

On that trip down-town she had seen “the press” with the flaws reduced
and the merits looming. She had looked into those all-seeing eyes
that watch the councils of statesmen and the movements of nations and
peoples, yet also note the swing of a murderous knife in an alley of the
slums. She had heard that stentorian voice of Publicity, arousing the
people of the earth to apprehend, to reflect, to progress.

She had been proud of Howard for his appearance, for what he said and
the way he said it. Now she was proud of him for the part he was taking
in this wonderful world-that-works. And she would not have confessed to
him how insignificant she felt, how weak and worthless.

She thought she was impatient for the time to come when she could learn
how to help him in his work, could begin to feel that she too had a
real share in it. With what seemed to her most creditable energy and
self-sacrifice she tried again to interest herself in newspapers. But
the trivial parts bored her; the chronicles of crime repelled her; and
the politics and most of the other serious articles were beyond the
range of her knowledge or of her interest. “I shall wait until we are
married,” she said, “then he will teach me.” And she did not suspect how
significant, how ominous her postponement was.

She asked him if he would not teach her and he replied: “Why, certainly,
if you are interested. But I don’t intend to trouble you with the
details of my profession. I want you to lead your own life--to do what
interests you.”

She did not stop to analyse her feeling of relief at this release, and
went on to protest: “But I want your life to be my life. I want there to
be only one life--our life.”

“And there shall be--each contributing his share, at least I’ll try to
contribute mine. But you have your own individuality, dear; and a very
strong one it is. And I don’t want you to change.”

At the time he was deep in his plans for illustrating the _News-Record_.
Early in that fall’s campaign they had secured the best cartoonist
in America. Cartoons are rarely the work of one man but are got up by
consultations. Howard spent never less than an hour each day with
the cartoonist, Wickham, wrestling with the problem of the next day’s
picture. For he insisted upon having a striking cartoon each day, and
gave it the most conspicuous place in the paper--the top-centre of the
first page.

“If a cartoon is worth printing at all,” he said, “it is worth printing
large and conspicuous. And to be worth printing it must be like an ideal
editorial--one point sharply and swiftly made and so clear that the most
careless glance-of-the-eye is enough.”

Wickham had made a series of cartoons on the campaign, humorous and
satirical, which had the distinction of being reproduced on lantern
slides for use in all parts of the town. It was an admirable beginning
of the new policy of illustration. Howard had been making a careful
study of all the illustrators in the country, not overlooking those
toiling in obscurity on the big western dailies. He had selected a staff
of twenty; as soon as Coulter and Stokely assented, he engaged them by
telegraph. Five were developed artists, the rest beginners with talent.
He gave all of his attention for two weeks to organising this staff.
He infected it with his enthusiasm. He impressed upon it his ideas of
newspaper illustration--the dash and energy of the French illustrators
adapted to American public taste. He insisted upon the artists studying
the French illustrated papers and applying what they learned. It was
not until the first Sunday in December that he felt ready to submit the
results of these labours to the public.

Again he scored over the “contemporaries” of the _News-Record_.
They printed many more illustrations than it did. It had only one
illustration on a page, but there was one on every page and a good one.
All the subjects were well chosen--either action or character--and as
many good looking women as possible.

“Never publish a commonplace face,” he said. “There is no such thing in
life as an uninteresting face. Always find the element of interest and
bring it out.”

The result of this policy, interpreted by a carefully trained and
enthusiastic staff, was what the out-of-town press was soon praising as
“a revelation in newspaper-illustration.” Howard himself was surprised.
He had mentally insured against a long period of disappointment.

“This shows,” he remarked to King and Vroom, “how much more competent
men are than we usually think--if they get a chance, if they are pointed
in the right direction and are left free.”

“He certainly knows his business.” Vroom was looking after Howard
admiringly. “I never saw anybody who so well understood when to lead and
when to let alone. What results he does get!”

“A pity to waste such talents on this thankless business,” said King.
“If he’d gone into real business, he would have a salary of a hundred
thousand a year, would be rich and secure for life. Why, a business
man could and would make a whole career on the ideas he has in a single
week. As it is----”

King shrugged his shoulders and Vroom finished the sentence for him:
“Coulter and Stokely could kick him out to-morrow and the _News-Record_
would go straight on living upon his ideas for ten years at least.”

Howard needed no one to make this truth clear to him to the full. Often,
as he thought of his expanding tastes, his expanding expenditures and
his expanding plans both for his private life and for his career, he
felt an awful sinking at the heart and a sense of fundamental weakness.

“I am building upon sand,” he said to himself. “In business, in the law,
in almost any other career to-day’s work would be to-morrow’s capital.
As it is, I am ever more and more a slave. To be free I ought to be poor
or rich. And I cannot endure the thought of poverty again. I must be
rich.”

The idea allured him to a degree that made him ashamed of himself.
Sometimes, when he was talking to Marian or writing editorials, all in
the strain of high principle and contempt for sordidness, he would flush
at the thought that he was in reality a good deal of a hypocrite. “I’m
expressing the ideals I ought to have, the ideals I used to have, not
the ideals I have.”

But the clearer this discrepancy became to him and the wider the gap
between what he ought to think and what he really did think, the more
strenuously he protested to himself against himself, and the more
fiercely he denounced in public the very poison he was himself taking.

“I am living in a tainted atmosphere,” he said to Marian. “We all are. I
fight against the taint but how can I hope to avoid the consequences if
I persist in breathing it, in absorbing it at every pore of my body?”

“I don’t understand you.” Marian was used to his moods of self-criticism
and did not attach much importance to them.

He thought a moment. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “What’s the use of
discussing what can’t be helped?” How could he tell her that the
greatest factor in his enervating environment was herself; that the
strongest chains which held him in it were the chains which bound him
to her? Indeed, was he not indulging in cowardly self-excuse in thinking
that this was true? Had not his success, rather than his love, made
ambition unfettered by principle the mainspring of his life?





XX.

ILLUSION.


“How shall we be married?” Howard asked her in the late Autumn.

“I know it will not be in a church with ushers and bridesmaids and a
crowd gaping at us. I suppose there is a public side to marriage since
the state makes one enter into a formal contract. But that can be done
privately. I should as soon think of driving down the Avenue with my
arms about your neck as of a public wedding.”

“Thank you,” he laughed. “I was afraid--well, women are usually so
fond of--but you’re not usual. Let us see. The minister is absolutely
necessary, I suppose. Would one feel married if there were not a
minister?”

“I don’t know--I feel--”

She hesitated and blushed but looked straight at him with that
expression in her eyes which always made him think of their love as
their religion.

“Feel--go on. I want to hear that very, very much.”

“I feel as if I were just as much married to you now as I ever could
be.”

“And that is how I have felt ever since the day, when I hardly knew you,
when you suddenly came into my life--my real, inner life where no one
had been before--and sat down and at once made it look as if it were
your home. And the place that had been lonely was lonely no more, and
has not been since.”

She put her hand in his and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Only that--that I am so happy. It--it frightens me. It seems so like a
dream.”

“It’s going to be a long, long dream, isn’t it?” He lifted her hand and
kissed it, then put it down in her lap again gently as if he feared a
sudden movement might awaken them. “Perhaps it had better be at Mrs.
Carnarvon’s house--some morning just before luncheon and we could go
quietly away afterward.”

“Yes--and--tell me,” she said, “wouldn’t it be better for us not to
go far away--and not to stay long? It seems to me that I most want to
begin--begin our life together just as it will be.”

“Are you afraid you wouldn’t know what to do with me if I were idling
about all day long?”

“Not exactly that. But I’d rather not take a vacation until we had
earned it together.”

“What a beautiful idea! I’ll see what I can do.”

They postponed the wedding until Howard had the “art-department” of the
_News-Record_ well established. It was on a bright winter day in the
second week of January that they stood up together and were married by
the Mayor whom Howard had helped to elect. Only Mr. and Mrs. Carnarvon
and Marian’s brother were there. Then the six sat down to luncheon, and
at three o’clock Howard and his wife started for Lakewood.

When they arrived a victoria was waiting. As soon as they were seated,
Howard said “Home.” The coachman touched his hat and the horses set
out at a swift trot. The sun was setting and the dry, still air was
saturated with the perfume of the snow-draped pines. Within five minutes
the carriage was at a pretty little cottage with wide, glass-enclosed
porches. They entered the hall. In the rooms on either side open fires
were blazing an ecstatic welcome.

“How do you like ‘home’?” asked Howard.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“You remember your plan of beginning at once. Well--this is the
compromise. Stokely has let me have his house here for a month--we may
keep it two if we like it. There is a telephone. The office isn’t two
hours away by rail. The newspapers are here early. We can combine work
and play.”

The manservant had left the room, a sort of library-reception room.
Marian was seated in a big chair drawn near the fire. She had thrown
back her wraps and was slowly drawing off her gloves. Howard stood at
the side of the fire, leaning against the mantel and looking down at
her.

“Before you definitely decide to stay--” he paused.

“Yes,” she said, her colour heightening as she slowly lifted her eyes to
his, “yes--why this solemn tone?”

“If ever--in the days that come--one never knows what may happen--if
ever you should find that you had changed toward me----”

“Yes?”

“I ask you--don’t promise--I never want you to promise me anything--I
want you always--at every moment--to be perfectly free. So I just ask
that you will let me see it. Then we can talk about it frankly, and we
can decide what is best to do.”

“But--suppose--you see I might still not wish to wound you--” she
suggested, half teasing, half in earnest.

“It seems to me now that it is impossible that we can ever change. It
seems to me--” he sat on the wide arm of her chair, and leaned over
until his head touched hers, “that if you were to change it would break
my heart. But if you were to change and were to hide it from me, I
should find it out some day and----”

“And what----”

“It would be worse--a broken heart, a horror of myself, a--a contempt
for you.”

“Whatever comes, I’ll be myself or try to be. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“And if you change?”

“But I shall not!”

“Why do you say that so positively?”

“Because--well, there are some things that we wish to believe and half
believe, and some things that we believe that we believe, and somethings
that we _know_. I _know_ about you--about my love for you.”

“It is strange in a way, isn’t it?” Marian was gently drawing her
fingers through his. “This is all so different from what I used to think
love would be. I used to picture to myself a man, something like you in
appearance, only taller and fair, who would be my master, who would make
me do what he wished. I think a woman always dreams of a lover who will
be strong enough to be her ruler. And here----”

“So I am not the strong man that you look up to and tremble before? We
shall see.”

“Don’t laugh at me. I mean that instead I have a man who makes me rule
myself. You make me feel strong, not weak, and proud, not humble. You
make me respect myself so.”

“The democracy of love--freedom, equality, fraternity. Don’t you like
it?”

“Madame is served.” It was the servant holding back one of the
portières, his face expressionless, his eyes down.

       *       *       *       *       *

Happiness evades description or analysis. We can only say that
it reaches its highest point when a man and a woman, intelligent,
appreciative, sympathetic, endowed with youth, health and freedom, are
devoting their energies solely and determinedly to verifying each a
preconceived idea of the other.

“And what do you think of it by this time?”

Marian asked the question in the pause after a twenty minutes’ canter
over a straightaway stretch through the pines.

“Of what?” Howard inquired. “I mean of what phase of it. Of you?”

“Well,--yes, of me--after a week.”

“As I expected, only more so--more than I could have imagined. And you,
what do you think?”

“It’s very different from what I expected. It seemed to me beforehand
that you, even you, would ‘get on my nerves’ just a little at times. I
didn’t expect you to appreciate--to feel my moods and to avoid doing--or
is it that you simply cannot do--anything jarring. You have amazing
instincts or else--” Marian looked at him and smiled mischievously, “or
else you have been well educated. Oh, I don’t mind--not in the least.
No matter what the cause, I’m glad--glad--glad that you have been taught
how to treat a woman.”

“I see you are determined to destroy me,” Howard was in jest, yet in
earnest. “I am not used to being flattered. I have never had but one
critic, and I have trained him to be severe and uncharitable. Now if you
set me up on a high altar and wave the censers and cry ‘glory, glory,
glory,’ I’ll lose my head. You have a terrible responsibility. I trust
you and I believe everything you say.”

“I’ll begin my duties as critic as soon as we go back to--to earth. But
at present I’m going to be selfish. You see it makes me happier to blind
myself to your faults.”

They rode in silence for a few moments and then she said:

“I wish I had your feeling about--about democracy. I see your point of
view but I can’t take it. I know that you are right but I’m afraid my
education is too strong for me. I don’t believe in the people as you do.
It’s beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not
wish you to feel as I do. I’d hate it if you did. It would be stooping,
grovelling for you to make distinctions among people. But----”

“Oh, but I do make distinctions among people--so much so that I have
never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate
terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with
me. Oh, yes, I’m one of the most exclusive persons in the world.”

“That sounds like autocracy, doesn’t it?” laughed Marian. “But you know
I don’t mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are,
only in different ways, whereas I feel that they’re not. You don’t mind
vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to
people so long as they don’t try to jump the fence about your own little
private enclosure.”

“Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being
let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social
distinctions. The fact is, isn’t it, that social distinctions are mere
trifles--”

“You oughtn’t to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what
I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can’t change an instinct.
To me some people are better than others and are entitled to more, and
ought to be looked up to and respected.”

Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high
principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in
this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with
her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so
unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most
three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind
long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a
spirit more in sympathy with his career.

“She is too intelligent, too high-minded,” he often reassured himself,
“to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but
class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people,
with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as
they are.”

So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity:
“Poor fallen queen--to marry beneath her. How she must have fought
against the idea of such a plebeian partner.”

“Plebeian--you?” Marian looked at him proudly. “Why, one has only to see
you to know.”

“Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain,
ordinary, common, untitled Americans.”

“Why, so were mine,” she laughed.

“Don’t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known
that.”

“I _am_ absurd, am I not?” Marian said gaily. “But let me have my craze
for well-mannered people and I’ll leave you your craze for the--the
masses.”

They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation;
for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this
matter--his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a
sociological unit.

He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening,
Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page
of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers
diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she
was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she
soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard
as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a
broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and
liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct
suggested nothing to her, bored her.

“Just read that,” he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it
and wonder what he meant.

“It seems to me,” she would think, “that it wouldn’t in the least matter
if that had not been printed.” Then she would ask evasively but with an
assumption of interest, “What are you going to do about it?”

And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts
that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of
news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes
clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her
unconquerable indifference to news.

She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she
often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as
a writer. “I’ll start right when we get to town,” she was constantly
promising herself. “It must, must, must be _our_ work.”

Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did
not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined
for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood
a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or
interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting
it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted
upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the
plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly
content to have her as the companion of his leisure.

Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy
instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might
have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right
development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and
deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring
her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes
and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.

When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course
of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and
Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything
to settle.




XXI.

WAVERING.

Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison
Avenue--just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the
stamp of Marian’s individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful
and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early
autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her
work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last
week of February.

“You--everywhere you,” he said, as they inspected room after room. “I
don’t see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful--the things
you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets,
pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but--”

He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for
her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed
her. “It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you
beauty but you make it wonderful because _you_ shine through it, give it
the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses,
eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such
effects with the materials. I don’t express it very well but--you
understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” She was leaning against him, her head resting upon
his shoulder. “And you like your home?”

“We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the
three great gods--Freedom, Love and Happiness. And--we’ll keep the fires
on the altars blazing, won’t we?”

His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the
morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go
to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not
having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone
until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to
follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As
he most often breakfasted about ten o’clock, she arranged to breakfast
regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house
until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those “everlasting
newspapers,” praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and
that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in
newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests,
domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being
directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.

If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so
super-sensitive to his passion for complete freedom, she would have
resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect
of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his
self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the
highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to “our” career. Thus
there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in
her regret that they were together so little.

“Good morning, stranger!” she said, as he came into the dining room one
day in early June.

He kissed her hand and then the “topknot” as he called the point into
which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. “It has been four
days since I saw you,” he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her
with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first
days of their acquaintance.

“I have missed you--you know,” she was trying to look cheerful, “but I
understand--”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “You understand what I intend, understand that I
mean my life to be for _us_. But sometimes--this morning--I think I am
mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this--” he threw his hand
contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, “this
trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the
pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life,
my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these.” And he pushed the
bundle of papers off the table.

“Something has depressed you.” She was leaning her elbow upon the table
and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. “I wouldn’t
have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must
work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You
would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through
Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should
I,” she laughed, “or I try to think I shouldn’t.”

“Let us go abroad for two months,” he said. “I am tired, so tired. I am
so weary of all these others, men and things.”

“Can you spare the time?”

“I”--he corrected himself--“we have earned a vacation. It will be for
me the first real vacation since I left Yale--thirteen years ago. I am
growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?”

“The sooner the better--if this is not a passing mood. What has
depressed you?” she persisted.

“What seems to be a piece of very good luck.” He laughed almost
sneeringly. “They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in
stock--which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as
the paper pays what it does now--twenty-five per cent. And they offer me
twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a
fair way to be rich.”

“They don’t want to lose you, evidently,” she said. “But why does this
make you sad? We are independent now--absolutely independent, both of
us.”

“Yes--we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a
year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be
free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open?
Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our
environment, speak for me?”

“I can’t imagine you a slave to mere dollars.”

“Can’t you? Well, I am afraid--I’m really afraid. I have always said
that if I wished to--enslave a people I would make them prosperous,
would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then
the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them
endure any oppression. Freedom’s battles were never fought by men with
full stomachs and full purses.”

“But rich men have given up everything for freedom--Washington was a
rich man.”

“Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time
coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and--I dread it.”

She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck
and her check against his.

“You are brave. You are strong,” she whispered. “You will meet that
crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how
the battle will go.”

He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. “We will
go abroad next Wednesday week,” he whispered, “and we’ll be happy in
France--in Switzerland--in Holland--I want to see the park at the Hague
again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with
moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water
so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about.”

       *       *       *       *       *

With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the
habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at
whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were
always laughing and talking--an endless flow of high spirits, absorption
each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it
suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them
of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not
far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.

“I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation,” he said.

“What is that--perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn’t have
believed you could be so idle.”

“Perfect idleness--yes. But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal
was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.”

And again, she said: “Let me see, what day is this?”

“I think it is Thursday or Friday,” he replied. “But it may be Sunday.
I can assure you that it is afternoon, late afternoon, and I think we
ought to dress for dinner soon. After dinner, if you still care to know,
and will remind me, I’ll try to find out the day. But I’m sure we shall
have forgotten before to-morrow.”

Howard got an extension of his leave of absence and they roamed about
England in August, reaching New York on the first day of September.
Marian went on to Mrs. Carnarvon at Newport and Howard took rooms at the
Waldorf. She stayed away a full week, then came to town, opened their
apartment, and surprised him with a formal invitation to dinner.

He came like a guest and they went through all the formalities of
meeting for the first time, of increasing intimacy--condensing a
complete courtship into one evening.

“I thought you had had enough of me for the time,” he said, as they sat
in the wide window-seat, he tracing with his forefinger the line of the
straps over her bare shoulders.

“And I thought that I would give you a chance to forget how nice I am
and so give you the pleasure of learning all over again. But it was so
lonely and miserable up there. ‘Who can come after the king?’”

“Sometimes I think I ought to stir about more--meet the men who lead
in the city. But it seems such a waste of time when I can come and call
upon you.”

“But might it not be better in the long run if you did meet these men?
Mightn’t it make your getting on quicker and easier?”

“Perhaps--if I were a gregarious animal, but I’m not. I’m shy and
solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make
friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy
can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too,
friends take up too much time. We have so little time and--we can spend
it to so much better advantage--can’t we?”

Marian pushed herself closer against him and presently said dreamily:
“So much happiness, such utter happiness which no one, nothing can take
away. I wonder when and how the first storm will come?”

“It needn’t come at all--not for a long, long time. And when it does--we
can weather it, don’t you think?”

       *       *       *       *       *

During the next two months they were together more than they had been in
the spring. He imposed day office hours upon himself and did no work in
the evenings except the correcting of editorial proofs which he had sent
to him at the house, at the theatre, or at whatever restaurant they were
dining. And at midnight he called up the office on the telephone
and talked with Mr. King or Mr. Vroom about the news in hand and the
programme for presenting it in the next morning’s paper.

But as “people”--meaning Marian’s friends--returned to town, they fell
into the former routine. It was in part his doing, in part hers. He was
now thirty-seven years old and his mind, always of a serious cast, was
intolerant of trifles and triflers.

Marian’s range of interests was shallower but much wider than his. Her
beauty, her cleverness, her tact caused her to be sought. She invited
many to their house and accepted more and more invitations. At first she
never went without him. But he was sometimes compelled by his work to
send her alone. He rarely went except for her sake--because he thought
going about amused her. And he was glad and relieved when she began to
go without him, instead of spending the evenings in solitude.

“There is no reason why you should punish yourself and punish me because
you had the ill luck to marry a working-man,” he said. “It cannot be
agreeable to sit here all by yourself evening after evening. And it
depresses me when I am at the office at night to think of you as lonely.
It makes me happier in my work--my pleasure, you know--to think of you
enjoying yourself.”

“But aren’t you afraid that some one will steal me?” she asked,
laughingly.

“Not I.” He was smiling proudly at her. “If you could be stolen, if you
could be happier anywhere than with me, you have only to let me into the
plot.”

“There are some women who would not like that.”

“And there are men who wouldn’t feel as I do. But you and I, we belong
to a class all by ourselves, don’t we?”

Apparently they were as devoted each to the other as ever. But each now
sought a separate happiness--he perforce in his work, she perforce in
the only way left open to her. When they were together, which meant
several hours every day and usually one whole day in the week, they
were at once seemingly absorbed each in the other with all the rest as
background. But none the less, they were leading separate lives, with
separate interests, separate tastes, separate modes of thinking. The
“bourgeois” life which they had planned--both standing behind the
counter and both adding up the results of the day’s business after they
had put up the shutters, two as one in all the interests of life--became
a dead and forgotten dream.





XXII.

THE SHENSTONE EPISODE.


On the way to or from the opera or a party, she would peep in on him,
watching the back of his head as he bent over his desk or read away at
some dull-looking book, wishing that he would feel her presence and turn
with that smile which was always hers from him, yet fearing to make a
sound and compel his attention.

“At times I think,” she said one day when he caught her in his arms on a
sudden impulse and kissed her, “that the reason you don’t try to rule me
is because you don’t care enough.”

“That’s precisely it.” He was smoothing her eyebrows with his
forefinger. “I don’t care enough about ruling. I don’t care enough for
the sort of love that responds to ‘must.’”

“But a woman likes to have ‘must’ said to her sometimes.”

“Does she? Do you? Well--I’ll say ‘must’ to you. You must love me freely
and voluntarily, or not at all. You must do as you please.”

“But don’t you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in
many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you
like--”

“But I couldn’t. Then you would no longer be _you_. And I like you so
well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head.”

Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was
in danger. “Not of falling in love with some other man,” she thought,
“for that’s impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me
to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I’d
accept and that would lead on and on--where?”

She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away
to Washington to assist the party leaders in putting through a difficult
tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He
expected to be gone a week; but week after week passed and he was still
at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian
hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early
and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation,
interest.

After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs.
Provost’s next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her
own age. Something in his expression--perhaps the amused way in which he
studied the faces of the others--attracted her to him. She glanced over
at his card. It read “Mr. Shenstone.”

“It doesn’t add much to your information, does it?” he smiled, as he
caught her glance rising from the card.

“Nothing,” she confessed candidly. “I never heard of you before.”

“And yet I’ve been splashing about, trying to attract attention to
myself, for twelve years.”

“Perhaps not in this particular pond.”

“No, that is true.”

“I was wondering what you do--lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man
or what.

“And what did you conclude?”

“I concluded that you did nothing.”

“You are right. But I try--I paint.”

“Portraits?”

“Yes.”

“That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you’ll get no
customers if you paint them as you see them.”

“I only see what they see when they look in the mirror.”

“Yes, but you see it impartial--or rather, I should say, cynically.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are
for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with
the women.”

“Are you a ‘devil with the women’?”

“Not I--not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you--I
am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so
discontented?”

“Because I have nothing to occupy my mind.”

“No children?”

“None--and no dogs.”

“No husband?”

“Husbands are busy.”

“So you are the typical American woman--the American instinct for doing,
the universal woman’s instinct for sunshine and laziness; the husband
absorbed in his business or profession with his domestic life as an
incident; the wife--like you.”

“That is right, and wrong--nearer right than wrong, a little unjust to
the husband.”

“Oh, it’s probably your fault that you are not absorbed in his business
or profession. It ought to be as much yours as his. What does he do?”

“He edits a newspaper.”

“Oh, he’s _the_ Mr. Howard. A very interesting, a very remarkable man.”

Marian was delighted by this appreciation. She talked with Shenstone
again after dinner and was pleased that he was to be in the same box
with her at the opera the next night. He had spent much of his time on
the other side of the Atlantic. He was unusually well educated for an
artist’s, and his mind was not developed in one direction only. Like
Marian, his point of view was artistic and emotional. Like her he had a
reverence for tradition, a deference to caste--the latter not offensive
for the same reason that hers was not, because good birth and good
breeding made him of the “high caste” and not a cringer with his eyes
craned upward. It seemed in him, as in her, a sort of self-respect.

Marian showed a candid liking for his society and he was quick to take
advantage of it. For a month they saw more and more each of the other,
she discreet without deliberation and he discreet with deliberation.
He talked to her of his work, of his ambition. He showed her himself
without egotism. He made an impression upon her so distinct and so
favourable that she admitted to herself that he was the most fascinating
man--except one--whom she had ever met.

When Howard at last returned, defeated by corruption within his
own party and for the time disgusted with politics, she at once had
Shenstone at the house to dine. “What do you think of Mr. Shenstone?”
 she asked when they were alone.

“No wonder you’re enthusiastic about him. As he talked to me, I could
hardly keep from laughing. It was your own views, almost your own words.
He has the look of a great man. I think he will ‘arrive,’ as they say in
the Bowery.”

Howard went out of his way to be agreeable to Shenstone, often inviting
him to the house and giving him a commission to paint Marian. For the
rest of the winter Shenstone was constantly in Marian’s company; so
constantly that they were gossiped about, and all the women who were
unpleasantly discussed “for cause” conspired to throw them together as
much as possible.

One evening in the very end of the winter, Howard called to Marian from
his dressing room: “Why, lady, Shenstone’s gone, hasn’t he? I’ve just
read a note from him.”

There was a pause before Marian answered in a constrained voice: “Yes,
he sailed to-day.”

Howard was tying his bow. He paused at the curious tone, then smiled
mysteriously to himself. He put on his waistcoat and coat and knocked on
the half-open door. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Yes--I’m waiting for dinner to be announced.”

She was sitting before the fire, very beautiful in her evening gown. She
seemed not to observe that he had entered but stared on into the flames.
He stood beside her, looking down at her with the half mocking, half
tender smile. Presently he sat upon the arm of her chair and took one of
her hands. “Poor, friendless, beautiful lady,” he said softly.

She glanced up quickly, her cheeks flaming but her eyes clear and frank.
“Why do you say that?” she asked in the tone of one who knows why.

“Other women will not be her friends because they are jealous of her,
and as for the men--how can a man be really a friend to a woman, a
fascinating, sympathetic woman?”

Marian hid her face against the lapel of his coat. “He told me,” she
whispered, “and then he went away.”

“He always does tell her. But----”

“But--what?”

“She doesn’t always send him away. Poor fellow! Still, he went into it
with his eyes open.”

“He was very nice. He told it in a roundabout way. And I wasn’t a bit
afraid that he’d--he’d--you know. But I got to thinking about how I’d
feel if he did--did touch me. And it made me--nervous.”

There was a long pause, then she went on: “I wonder how you’d feel about
touching another woman?”

“I? Dear me, I wonder! I never thought. You see I’m such a domestic,
unattractive creature----”

“Don’t laugh at me, please,” she pleaded.

“I’m not laughing. Underneath, I’m thinking--thinking what I would do if
I met you and lost you. It’s very black on the Atlantic for one pair of
eyes to-night.”

“And the worst of it is,” she said, “that my vanity is flattered and I’m
not really sorry for him.”

“Rather proud of her conquest, is she?”

“Yes, it pleased me to have him care.”

“She likes to think that he’ll carry his broken heart to the grave, does
she?”

“Yes. Isn’t it shameful?”

“Shameful? Shameless. I have always held that even the best woman dearly
loves to ruin a man. It’s such a triumph. And the more she loves him,
the more she’d like to ruin him--that is, if ruin came solely through
love for her and didn’t involve her.”

“But I would not want to ruin you.”

“If that seemed to be the supreme test of my love for you--are you sure?
I’m not. There’s Thomas, knocking to announce dinner.”

The Shenstone incident was apparently closed. Marian, a most attractive
woman of thirty, absorbed in a social life that demanded all her
physical and mental energy as well as all of her time, did not long
vividly remember him. But he had given her a standard by which she
unconsciously measured her husband. She contrasted the life he had
promised her, the life Shenstone reminded her of, with the life that
was--so material, so suspiciously physical when it professed to be
loving, so suspiciously chill when it professed to be friendly. She
thrust aside these thoughts as disloyal and false. But they persisted in
returning.

If she had been less appreciative of Howard’s intellect, less fascinated
by the charm of his personality, she would soon have become one of the
“misunderstood” women in search of “consolation.” Instead, she turned
her mind in the direction natural to her character--social ambition.





XXIII.

EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING.


In such a city as New York, to be deliberately careful about money is
the only way to keep within one’s income, whether it be vast or small.
There are temptations to buy at the end of every glance of the eye.
The merchants are crafty in producing new and insidious allurements, in
creating new and expensive tastes. But these might be resisted were it
not that the habits of all one’s associates are constantly and all but
irresistibly stimulating the faculty of imitation.

Neither Howard nor Marian had been brought up to be watchful about
money. Both had been accustomed to having their wants supplied. And
now that they had a household and a growing income, it was a matter
of course that their expenditures should steadily expand. Before three
years had passed they were spending more than double the sum which
at the outset they had fixed upon as their limit. A merely decent and
self-respecting return of the hospitalities they accepted, a carriage
and pair and two saddle horses and the servants to look after
them--these items accounted for the increase. They looked upon this as
really necessary expenditure and soon would have found that curtailment
involved genuine deprivation. From the very beginning each step in
expansion made the next logical and inevitable, made the plea of
necessity seem valid.

An aunt of Marian’s died, leaving her a “small” house--worth perhaps a
quarter of a million--near the Avenue in Sixty-fifth Street, and eighty
thousand in cash. About the same time Stokely told Howard of a fine
speculative opportunity in certain copper properties. Howard hesitated.
He knew that the way of speculation was the way of bondage for his
newspaper and for him. But this particular adventure seemed harmless and
he yielded. The money was invested and within a few months was producing
an income of fifteen thousand a year which promised to be steady.
Howard’s ownership of stock in the paper increased; and as the profits
advanced swiftly with its swift growth in its illustrated form, his own
income was nearly fifty thousand a year. They were growing very rich.
There was no longer the slightest anxiety as to money in his mind.

“You know the great dread I had in marrying,” he said to her one day,
“was lest I should make myself and you dependents, should some day
sacrifice my freedom to my fear of losing--happiness.”

“Yes, and very foolish you were, not to have more confidence in yourself
and in me.”

“Perhaps. But what I am thinking is that you have brought me luck. I am
free, beyond anybody’s reach. I could quit the paper to-morrow and we
should hardly have to change our style of living even if I did not get
something else to do.”

“Style of living--” in that phrase lay the key to the change that was
swiftly going on in Howard’s mind and mental attitude. It is not easy
for a man with environment wholly in his favour to keep his point
of view correct, to keep his horizon wide and clear, his sense of
proportion just. It is next to impossible for him to do so when his
environment opposes.

The man who looks out from misery and squalor upon misery and squalor
is, if he thinks at all, naturally an anarchist. To him the established
order shows only injustice and persistence of injustice. The man who
looks out from luxury and ease and well-being upon luxury and ease and
well-being is forced by the very limitations of the human mind to an
over-reverence for the established order. He is unreasonably suspicious
of anything that threatens change. “When I’m comfortable all’s well in
the world; change might bring discomfort to me.” And he flatters himself
that he is a “conservative.”

Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right
thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying
his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life
he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her,
indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from
what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him
into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that
he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon
love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the
great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living
near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through
the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point
in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals,
mind and character, to the surface qualities--dress and style and
manners and refinement, and even dress.

This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from
the apartment. After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun
to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had
progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed
natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real
New York “establishment.”

“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses.
Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now
this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would
be.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” he laughed, “and you must try it.” He was as
enthusiastic as she.

In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more
artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great
expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an
individuality--a revelation of a woman’s beautiful mind, inspired by
love.

“At last I have something to interest, to occupy me,” she said. “This is
our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to
me to keep it always like this.”

“You--degenerated into a household drudge,” he mocked. “Why, you used to
laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of
my ideals.”

“Did I?” she answered. “Well, as you would say, see what I’ve come to
through living with--a member of the working-classes.”

Howard’s own particular part of this house included a library with a
small study next to it. In the study was a most attractive table with
plenty of room to spread about books and papers, a huge divan in the
corner and a fire-place near by. He found himself doing more and more of
his work at home. There were not so many interruptions as at the office,
the beauty of the surroundings, the consciousness that “she” was not far
away--all combined to keep him at home and to enable him to do more and
better work there.

He was justly and greatly proud of her achievement; and where he used to
be more regretful than he admitted even to himself when they had guests,
he was now glad to see others about, admiring her taste, appreciating
her skill as a hostess and giving him opportunities to look at her from
an ever new point of view.

Of course these guests were almost all “_their_ kind of
people”--amiable, well mannered persons who thought and acted in that
most conventional of moulds, the mould of “good society.” They
fitted into the surroundings, they did their part toward making those
surroundings luxurious--a “wallow of self-complacent content.” And this
environment soon suited and fitted him exactly.

But to her he was still The Democrat. She loved him in the way and to
the degree which her character, as the years had developed it, permitted
her to love. And this love, or rather admiring respect, was wholly based
upon her ideal of him, her belief in the honesty and intensity of his
convictions. While she did not share them, she had breadth enough to
admire them and to regard them as high removed above her own ideas to
which for herself she held tenaciously, instinct and association and
“tradition” triumphing over reason.

Howard retained his ideal of her, never examining her closely, never
seeing or suspecting what a pale love she gave him and how shrivelled
had become the part of her nature which she and he both assumed was most
strongly developed. He knew how she idealised him and did not dare to
undeceive her. Therefore he practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew
steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no
single moment at which he could conveniently halt and “straighten the
record.” At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by
degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was
only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her
self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had
formerly put upon it. What if she should find him out?

       *       *       *       *       *

When the famous “coal conspiracy” was formed, three of the men
conspicuous in it were among their intimates--that is, their families
were often at his house and he and Marian were often at theirs. Yet he
had never made a more relentless attack. Nor did he, either in the news
columns or on the editorial page, conceal the connection of his three
friends with the conspiracy.

“Mrs. Mercer was here this morning,” Marian said as they were waiting
for the butler to announce dinner. She was flushed and embarrassed.

Howard laughed. “And did she tell you what a dreadful husband you had?”

“Oh, she didn’t blame you at all. She said they all knew how perfectly
upright you were. Only, she said you did not understand and were doing
Mr. Mercer a great injustice.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Why--I can’t believe--is it possible, dear--I was just reading one of
your editorials. Can Mr. Mercer be in such a scheme? The way she told
it to me, he and the others were really doing a lot of people a
valuable service, putting their property on a paying basis, enabling the
railroads to meet their expenses and to keep thousands and thousands of
men employed.”

“Poor Mercer!” Howard said ironically. “Poor misunderstood
philanthropist! What a pity that that sort of benevolence has to be
carried on by bribing judges and prosecutors and legislatures, by making
the poor shiver and freeze, by subtracting from the pleasures and
adding to the anxieties of millions. One would almost say that such
a philanthropy had better not be undertaken. It is so likely to be
misunderstood by the ‘unruly classes.’”

“Oh, I knew you were right. I told her you must be right, that you never
wrote until you knew.”

“And what was the result?”

“Well, we are making some very bitter enemies.”

“I doubt it. I suspect that before long they’ll come wheedling about in
the hope that I’ll let up on them or be a little easier next time.”

“I’m sure I do not care what they do,” said Marian, drawing herself up.
“All I care for is--you, and to see you do your duty at whatever cost
or regardless of cost--” she was leaning over the back of his chair with
her arms about his neck and her lips very near to his ear--“you are my
love without fear and without reproach.”

“Listen, dear.” He took her hand and drew her arms more closely about
his neck. “Suppose that the lines were drawn--as they may be any day.
Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our
position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as
editor--all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a
thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right.
Wouldn’t you miss your friends?”

“_All_ our friends? And who will be on the other side?”

“Almost no one that we know--that you would care to call upon or go
about with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of
wealth or social position. Those other people who are in town when it is
said ‘Nobody is in town now!’”

She did not answer.

“Where would you be?” he repeated.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that.” She came around and sat on his
knee. “Where? Why, there’s only one ‘where’ in all this world for
me--‘wheresoever thou goest.’”

And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with
her was smothered by her.

Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how
fearless he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him,
how blessed she was in the love of such a man. And he--he was regretting
that his “pose” had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not
been so bitter in his attacks upon his and his wife’s friends, the coal
conspirators. When he had definitely cast in his lot with “the shearers”
 why persist in making his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more
loudly than ever in behalf of “the sheep?” Above all, why had he let
his habit of voluble denunciation lead him into this hypocrisy with the
woman he loved?

He admitted to himself that “causes” had ceased to interest him except
as they might contribute to the advancement of his power. Power!--that
was his ambition now. First he had wished to have an independent income
in order to be free. When he had achieved that, it was at the sacrifice
of his mental freedom. And now, with the clearness of self-knowledge
which only men of great ability have, he knew that the one cause for
which he would make sacrifices was--himself.

“Of what are you thinking so gloomily?” she interrupted.

“Oh--I--let me see--well, I was thinking what a fraud I am; and that I
wished I could dupe myself as completely as I can dupe--”

“Me?” she laughed. “Oh, we’re all frauds--shocking frauds. I wouldn’t
have you see me as I really am for anything.”

Although her remark was a commonplace, of small meaning, as he knew,
he got comfort out of it, so desperately was he casting about for some
consolation.

“That’s true, my dear,” he said. “And I wish that you liked the kind of
a fraud I am as well as I like the kind of a fraud you are.”





XXIV.

“MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”


Stokely came rushing into his office the next morning. “Good God, old
man,” he exclaimed, “What’s the meaning of this attack on the coal
roads?”

Howard flushed with resentment, not at what Stokely said, but at his
tone.

“Now, don’t get on your high horse. I don’t think you understand.”
 Stokely’s tone had moderated. “Don’t you know that the Delaware Valley
road is in this?”

Howard started. He had just invested two hundred thousand dollars in
that stock on Stokely’s advice “No, I didn’t know it.” He recovered
himself. “And furthermore I don’t give a damn.” He struck his desk
angrily. His simulation of incorruptible indignation for the moment half
deceived himself.

“Why, man, if this infernal roast is kept up, you’ll lose a hundred
thousand. Then there are my interests. I’m up to my neck in this deal.”

“My advice to you is to get out of it. I’m sorry, but you know as well
as I do that the thing is infamous.”

“Infamous--nonsense! It will double our dividends and the consumers
won’t feel it.”

“Let us not discuss it, Stokely. There--don’t say anything you’ll
regret.”

“But--”

“Now, Stokely--don’t argue it with me.”

Stokely put on his hat, stood up and looked at Howard with sullen
admiration. “You will drive away the last friend you’ve got on earth, if
you keep this up. Good morning.”

Howard sent a smile of cynical amusement after him, then stared
thoughtfully into the mass of papers on his desk for five, ten, fifteen
minutes. When his plan was formed he touched the electric button.

“Please tell Mr. King I’d like to see him,” he said to the answering
boy.

Mr. King entered with a bundle of legal documents. “I suppose it’s the
injunction you want to discuss,” he said. “We’ve got the papers all
ready. It’s simply great. Those fellows will be in a corner and will
have to give up. They can’t get away from us. The price of coal will
drop half a dollar within a week, I’ll bet.”

“I’m afraid you are over sanguine,” Howard said. “I’ve just been going
over the matter with my lawyer. But leave the papers with me. And--about
the news--be careful what you say. We’ve been going a little strong. I
think a little less personal matter would be advisable.”

Mr. King was amazed and looked it. He slowly pulled himself together to
say, “All right, Mr. Howard. I think I understand.” He laid the papers
down and departed. Outside the door he laughed softly to himself.
“Somebody’s been cutting his comb, I guess,” he murmured. “Well, I
didn’t think he’d last. New York always gets ‘em when they’re worth
while.”

As the door closed behind King, Howard drew out the lowest and deepest
drawer of his desk. It was half-filled with long-undisturbed pamphlets
and newspaper cuttings. He tossed in the injunction papers. A cloud of
dust flew up and settled thickly upon them. He shut the drawer.

He went to the window and looked out over the city--that seductive,
that overwhelming expression of wealth and power. “What was it my father
wrote me when I told him I was going to New York?” and he recalled
almost the exact words--“New York that lures young men from the towns
and the farms, and prostitutes them, teaches them to sell themselves
with unblushing cheeks for a fee, for an office, for riches, for power.”
 He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, drew himself up, returned to his desk
and was soon absorbed in his work.

The next morning the _News-Record’s_ double-leaded “leader” on the
Coal Trust was a discharge of heavy artillery. But it was artillery
in retreat. And in the succeeding days, the retreat continued--not
precipitate but orderly, masterly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten days after their talk on the “coal conspiracy” Marian greeted him
late in the afternoon with “Oh, such a row with Mrs. Mercer!”

“Mrs. Mercer! Why, what was she angry about?”

“She wasn’t--at least, not at first. It was I. I went to see her and she
asked me to thank you for stopping that fight on the coal conspiracy.”

“That was tactful of her,” Howard said, turning away to hide his
nervousness.

“And I told her that you had not stopped, that you wouldn’t stop until
you had broken it up. And she smiled in a superior way and said I was
quite mistaken, that I didn’t read the paper, I haven’t read it for
several days, but I knew _you_, dear, and I remembered what you had
said. And so we just had it. We were polite but furious when I went. I
shall never go near her again.”

“But, unfortunately, we have stopped. We had to do it. We could
accomplish nothing.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. What angered me was her insinuation.”

“That was irritating. But, tell me, what if it had been true?” Howard’s
voice was strained and he was looking at her eagerly, with fever in his
eyes.

“But it couldn’t be. It isn’t worth while imagining. You could not be
a coward and a traitor.” So complete was her confidence in him that
suspicion of him was impossible.

“Would you sit in judgment on me?”

“Not if I could help it.”

“But you can--you could help it.” His manner was agitated, and he spoke
almost fiercely. “I am free,” he went on, and as she watched his
eyes she understood why men feared him. “I do what I will. I am not
accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve
of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to
love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You
must take me as you find me or not at all.”

She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned
forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. “I
love you,” he said. “Ah, how I love you--not because you love me, not
because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not
for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what
you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars
or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as
proudly.”

He drew along breath and his hand trembled. “If I were a traitor, then,
if you loved me, you would say, ‘What! Is he to be found among traitors?
How I love treason!’ If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the
vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want
no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and
provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to
changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the
colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded
lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves.”

“You know you have it.” She had been compelled by his mood and was
herself in a fever. She looked at him with the expression which used to
make his nerves vibrate. “You know that no human being ever was more to
another than I to you. But you can’t expect me to be just the same
as you are. I love _you_--not the false, base creature you picture. I
admire the way you love, but I could not love in that way. Thank God, my
love, my dear--I shall never be put to that test. For my love for you is
my--my all.”

“We are very serious about a mere supposition.”

Howard was laughing, but not naturally. “We take each the other far too
seriously. I’m sorry you idealise me so. Who knows--you might find me
out some day--and then--well, don’t blame me.”

Marian said no more, but late that evening she put her hands on his
shoulders and said: “You’re not hiding something from me--something we
ought to bear together?”

“Not I.” Howard smiled down into her eyes and kissed her.

His mood of reaction, of hysteria had passed. He was thinking how
little in reality she had had to do with his outburst. He had not been
addressing her at all, except as she seemed to him for the moment the
embodiment of his self-respect--or rather, of an “absurd,” “extremely
youthful” ideal of self-respect which he had “outgrown.”




XXV.

THE PROMISED LAND.


A woman with a powerful personality may absorb in herself a man of
strong and resolute ambition, may compel him to make her his career, to
feel that to get and to keep her is all that he asks from destiny. But
Marian was not such a woman.

She had come into Howard’s life at just the time and in just the way to
arouse his latent passion for power and to give it a sufficient initial
impetus. It was love for her that set him to lifting himself from among
those who work through themselves alone to the potent few who work
chiefly by directing the labour of others.

Once in this class, once having tasted the joy of power, Howard was
lost to her. She was unable to restrain or direct, or even clearly to
understand. She became an incident in his life. As riches came with
power, they pushed him to one side in her life. Living in separate parts
of a large house, leading separate lives, rarely meeting except when
others were present--following the typical life of New Yorkers of
fortune and fashion--they gradually grew to know little and see little
and think little each of the other.

There was no abruptness in the transition. Every day had contributed its
little toward widening the gap. There was no coolness, no consciousness
of separation; simply the slow formation of the habit of complete
independence each of the other.

His ambitions absorbed his thought and his time. To them he found her
very useful. The social side--forming and keeping up friendly relations
with the families whose heads were men of influence--was a vital part of
his plan. But he used her just as he used every and any one else whom
he found capable of contributing to his advancement; and, as she never
insisted upon herself, never sought to influence or even to inquire into
his course of action, she did not find him out.

She was in a vague way an unhappy woman. A discontent, a feeling that
her life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly
unhappy, often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare analytic moods she
attributed their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to
the hard work which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great
love which she assumed they felt each for the other. She would not and
could not see that that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of
forms, of phrases and of impulses of passion to conceal its departure.
And to this view he outwardly assented, when she suggested it; but he
knew that she was deceiving herself as to him, and wondered if she were
not deceiving herself as to her own feelings.

Up to the time of the “Coal Conspiracy” and his attempt to put himself
straight with her, the idea of his love for her and of her oneness with
him had at least a hold upon his imagination. He then saw how far apart
they had drifted; and he dismissed from his mind even the pretense
that love played any part in his life. After that definite break with
principle and self-respect for the sake of his coal holdings, his
Wall Street friends and his newspaper career, the development of his
character continued along strictly logical lines with accelerating
speed. And it was accompanied by an ever franker, more cynical
acceptance of the change.

He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of
judgment necessary to great achievement--although many “successful” men,
for obvious reasons of self-interest, diligently encourage the popular
theory of warped conscience. He was well aware that he had shifted from
the ideal of use _to_ his fellow-beings to the ideal of use _of_ his
fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation.
And he knew that the two ideals can not be combined and that he not
only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He
despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising
them.

His quarrel with himself was that he seemed to himself a rather vulgar
sort of hypocrite. This was highly disagreeable to him, as his whole
nature tended to make him wish to be himself, to make him shrink from
the part of the truckler and the sycophant which he was playing so
haughtily and so artistically. At times it exasperated him that he could
not regard his change of front as a deliberate sale for value received,
and not as the weak and cowardly surrender which he saw that it really
was.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the day after Howard’s forty-fourth birthday Coulter fell dead at the
entrance to the Union Club. When Stokely heard of it he went direct to
the _News-Record_ office.

“I happen to know something about Coulter’s will,” he said to Howard.
“The _News-Record_ stock is to be sold and you and I are to have the
first chance to take it at three hundred and fifty--which is certainly
cheap enough.”

“Why did he arrange to dispose of the most valuable part of his estate?”

“Well, we had an agreement about it. Then, too, Coulter had no faith in
newspapers as a permanent investment. You know there are only the widow,
the girl and that worthless boy. Heavens, what an ass that boy is!
Coulter has tied up his estate until the youngest grandchild comes of
age. He hopes that there will be a son among the grandchildren who will
realise his dream.”

“Dream?” Howard smiled. “I didn’t know that Coulter ever indulged in
dreams.”

“Yes, he had the rich man’s mania--the craze for founding a family. So
everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for
years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable
who’ll use his name and his money to advertise nature’s contempt for
family pride in her distributions of brains. I think even a fine tomb is
a wiser memorial.”

“Well, how much of the stock shall you take?” Howard asked.

“Not a share,” Stokely replied dejectedly. “Coulter couldn’t have died
at a worse time for me. I’m tied in every direction and shall be for a
year at least. So you’ve got a chance to become controlling owner.”

“I?” Howard laughed. “Where could I get a million and a half?”

“How much could you take in cash?”

“Well--let me see--perhaps--five hundred thousand.”

“You can borrow the million with the stock as collateral.”

“But how could I pay?”

“Why, your dividends at our present rate would be more than two hundred
thousand a year. Your interest charge would be under seventy-five
thousand. Perhaps I can arrange it so that it won’t be more than fifty
thousand. You can let the balance go on reducing the loan. Then I may
be able to put you onto a few good things. At any rate you can’t lose
anything. Your stock would bring five hundred even at forced sale. It’s
your chance, old man. I want to see you take it.”

“I’ll think it over. I have no head for figures.”

“Let me manage it for you.” Stokely rose to go. Howard began thanking
him, but he cut him off with:

“You owe me no thanks. You’ve made money for me--big money. I owe you
my help. Besides, I don’t want any outsider in here. Let me know when
you’re ready.” He nodded and was gone.

“What a chance!” Howard repeated again and again.

He was looking out over New York.

Twenty years before he had faced it, asking of it nothing but a living
and his freedom. For twenty years he had fought. Year by year, even
when he seemed to be standing still or going backward, he had steadily
gained, making each step won a vantage-ground for forward attack. And
now--victory. Power, wealth, fame, all his!

Yet a deep melancholy came over him. And he fell to despising himself
for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its
sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm. Why was he denied the
happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it
out, now that the end was attained?

His mind went out, not to Marian, but to that other--the one sleeping
under the many, many layers of autumn leaves at Asheville. And he heard
a voice saying so faintly, so timidly: “I lay awake night after night
listening to your breathing, and whispering under my breath, ‘I love
you, I love you. Why can’t you love me?’” And then--he flung down the
cover of his desk and rushed away home.

“Why did I think of Alice?” he asked himself. And the answer
came--because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had
beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of this slavery to
appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation
regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and
not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.

He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago--yet he could
not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the
mirror of memory.

He was triumphant, but self-respect had gone and not all the thick
swathings of vanity covered him from the stabs of self-contempt.

“When I am really free, when the paper is paid for and I can do as
I please, why not try to be a man again? Why not? It would cost me
nothing.”

But a man is the sum of _all_ his past.





XXVI.

IN POSSESSION.


Stokely arranged the loan, and within six months Howard was controlling
owner of the _News-Record._ There was a debt of a million and a quarter
attached to his ownership, but he saw how that would be wiped out. Once
more he threw himself into his work with the energy of a boy. He had
to give much of his time to the business department--to the details of
circulation and advertising. He felt that the profits of the paper
could be greatly increased by improving its facilities for reaching
the advertiser and the public. He had never been satisfied with the
circulation methods; but theretofore his ignorance of business and
his position as mere salaried editor had acted in restraint upon his
interference with the “ground floor.”

As he had suspected, the business office was afflicted with the twin
diseases--routine and imitativeness. It followed an old system, devised
in days of small circulation and grudgingly improved, not by thought
on the part of those who circulated the paper, but by compulsion on
the part of the public. No attempts were made to originate schemes for
advertising the paper. The only methods were wooden variations upon
placards in the street cars and the elevated stations, and cards hung
up at the news-stands. As forgetting advertising business, they thought
they showed enterprise by a little canvassing among the conspicuous
merchants in Greater New York.

Howard had charts made showing the circulation by districts. With these
as a basis he ordered an elaborate campaign to “push” the paper in the
districts where it was circulated least and to increase its hold where
it was strong. “We do not reach one-third of the people who would like
to take our paper,” he told Jowett, the business manager. “Let us have
an army of agents and let us take up our territory by districts.”

The Sunday edition was the largest source of revenue, both because it
carried a great deal more advertising at much higher rates than did the
week-day editions, and because it sold at a price which yielded a profit
on the paper itself, while the price of the weekday editions did not.
News constituted less than one-fourth of its contents. The rest was
“feature articles,” as interesting a week late to a man in Seattle as on
the day of publication within a mile of the office.

“We get out the very best magazine in the market,” said Howard to
Jowett. “Are we pushing it in the east, in the west, in the south? Look
at the charts.

“We have a Sunday circulation of five hundred in Oregon, of one thousand
in Texas, of six hundred in Georgia, of two thousand in Maine. Why not
ten times as much in each of those states? Why not ten times as much as
we now have near New York?”

There was no reason except failure to “push” the paper. That reason
Howard proceeded to remove. But these enterprises involved large
expenditures, perhaps might mean postponement of the payment of the
debt. Receipts must be increased and the most promising way was an
increase in the advertising business.

Howard noted on the chart nineteen cities and large towns near New York
in each of which the daily circulation of the _News-Record_ was equal
to that of any paper published there and far exceeded the combined
circulations of all the home dailies on Sunday. This suggested a system
of local advertising pages, and for its working out he engaged one of
the most capable newspaper advertising men in the city. Within three
months the idea had “caught on” and, instead of sending useless columns
of New York “want-ads” and the like to places where they could not be
useful, the _News-Record_ was presenting to its readers in twelve cities
and towns the advertisements of their local merchants.

A year of this work, with Howard giving many hours of each day
personally to tiresome details, brought the natural results. The profits
of the _News-Record_ had risen to five hundred and forty thousand, of
which Howard’s share was nearly three hundred thousand. The next year
the profits were seven hundred and fifty thousand, and Howard had
reduced his debt to eight hundred thousand.

“We shall be free and clear in less than three years,” he said to
Marian.

“If we have luck,” she added.

“No--if we work--and we shall. Luck is a stone which envy flings at
success.”

“Then you don’t think you have been lucky?”

“Indeed I do not.”

“Not even,” she smiled, drawing herself up.

“Not even--” he said with a faint, sad answering smile. “If you only
knew how hard I worked preparing myself to be able to get you when you
came; if you only, only knew how life made me pay, pay, pay; if you only
knew--”

“Go on,” she said, coming closer to him.

He sighed--not for the reason of sentiment which she fancied, though he
put his arms around her. “How willingly I paid,” he evaded.

He went to his desk and she stood looking at him. There was still
the charm of youth, even freshness, in her beauty--and she was not
unconscious of the fact.

And he--he was handsome, distinguished looking and certainly did not
suggest age or the approach of age; but in his hair, so grey at the
temples, in the stern, rather haughty lines of his features, in the
weariness of his eyes, there was not a vestige of youth. “How he has
worked for me and for his ideals,” she thought, sadly yet proudly. “Ah,
he is indeed a great man, and _my_ husband!” And she bent over him
and kissed him on an impulse to a kind of tenderness which was now so
strange to her that it made her feel shy.

“And what a radical you’ll be,” she laughed, after a moment’s silence.
“What a radical, what a democrat!”

“When?” He was flushing a little and avoided her eyes.

“When you’re free--really the proprietor--able to express your own
views, all your own views. We shall become outcasts.”

“I wonder,” he replied slowly, “does a rich man own his property or does
it own him?”

For an instant he had an impulse of his old longing for sympathy, for
companionship. She was now thirty-six and, save for an expression of
experience, of self-control, seemed hardly so much as thirty. But with
the years, with the habit of self-restraint, with instinctive rather
than conscious realisation of his indifference toward her, had come a
chill perceptible at the surface and permeating her entire character. In
her own way she had become as self-absorbed, as ambitious as he.

He looked at her, felt this chill, sighed, smiled at himself. Yes, he
was alone--and he preferred to be alone.





XXVII.

THE HARVEST.


Through all his scheming and shifting Howard had kept the _News-Record_
in the main an “organ of the people.” Coulter and Stokely had on many
occasions tried to persuade him to change, but he had stood out. He did
not confess to them that his real reason was not his alleged principles
but his cold judgment that the increases in circulation which produced
increases in advertising patronage were dependent upon the paper’s
reputation of fearless democracy.

In the fourth year of his ownership he felt that the time had come for
the change, that he could safely slip over to the other side--the
side of wealth and power, the winning side, the side with offices
and privileges to distribute. His debt was so far reduced that he had
nothing to fear from it. A presidential campaign was coming on and was
causing unusual confusion, a general shift of party lines. And he had
put the _News-Record_ in such a position that it could move in any
direction without shock to its readers.

The “great battle” was on--the battle he had in his younger days looked
forward to and longed for--the battle against Privilege and for
a “restoration of government by the people.” The candidates were
nominated, the platforms put forward and the issue squarely joined.

The same issue had been involved in previous campaigns; but the
statement of the case by the party opposed to “government of, by and for
plutocracy” had been fantastic, extreme, entangled with social, economic
and political lunacies. And Howard had strengthened the _News-Record_ by
refusing to permit it to “go crazy.” Now, however, there was in honesty
no reason for refusing support to the advocates of his professed
principles.

But the _News-Record_ was silent. Howard and Marian went away to their
cottage at Newport, and he left rigid instructions that no political
editorials were to be published except those which he might send. There
he got typhoid fever and was at the point of death for two weeks.

Marian gave herself to nursing him, stayed close beside him, read books
and the newspapers to him throughout his convalescence. They were
more intimate than they had been for years. A feeling bearing a remote
resemblance to the love he had once had for her arose out of his
weakness and dependence and his seclusion from the instruments and
objects of his ambition. And she swept aside the barriers she had
erected between herself and him and returned, as nearly as one may, to
the love and interest of their early days together.

In the first week of September came Stokely with Senator Hereford, the
chairman of the “Plutocracy” campaign committee.

“I shall not annoy you with evasions,” said Hereford, “as Mr. Stokely
assures me that I may speak freely to you, that you personally are with
us. The fact is, our campaign is in a bad way, especially in New York
State, and there especially in New York City.”

“You surprise me,” said Howard. “All my information has come from the
newspapers which my wife reads me. I had gathered that the victory was
all but won.”

“We encourage that impression. You know how many weak-kneed fellows
there are who like to be on the winning side. We’ve been pouring out the
money and stand ready to pour it out like water. But these damned reform
ballot-laws make it hard for us to control the vote. We buy, but we fear
that the goods will not be delivered. Feeling is high against us. Even
our farmers and shopkeepers are acting queerly. And the other fellows
have at last put up a safe man on a conservative platform.”

Howard turned his face away. There was still the memory, the now
quickened memory, of his former self to make him wince at being included
in such an “us.”

“You can’t afford to keep silent any longer,” Hereford continued.
“You’ve done the cause a world of good by your silence thus far. You
have the reputation of being the leading popular organ, and your keeping
quiet has meant thousands of votes for us. But the time has come to
attack. And you must attack if we are to carry New York. You can turn
the tide in the state, and--well, we have a very high regard for your
genius for making your points clearly and interestingly. We need your
ideas for our editors and speakers as much as we need your influence.”

“I cannot discuss it to-day,” Howard answered after a moment’s silence.
“It would be a grave step for the _News-Record_ to take. I am not well,
as you see. To-morrow or next day I’ll decide. You’ll see my answer in
the paper, I think.” He closed his eyes with significant weariness.

Hereford looked at him uneasily. Just outside the door Stokely
whispered, “Don’t be alarmed. You’ve got him. He’s with us, I tell you.”

“I must make sure,” whispered Hereford. “I wish to speak to him alone
for a moment.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Howard,” he said as he re-entered the room. “I
forgot an important part of my mission. Our candidate authorized me to
say to you on his behalf that he felt sure you would see your duty; that
he esteemed your character and judgment too highly to have any doubts;
and that he intends to show his appreciation of the conscientious,
independent vote which is rallying to his support; in the event of his
election, he feels that he could not do so in a more satisfactory manner
than by offering you either a place in his cabinet or an ambassadorship
as you may prefer.”

As soon as Howard saw Hereford returning, he knew the reason. He had
never before been offered a bribe; but he could not mistake the meaning
of Hereford’s bold yet frightened expression. He kept his eyes averted
during the delivery of the long, rambling sentence. At the end, he
looked at Hereford frankly and said in his most gracious manner:

“Thank him for me, will you? And express my appreciation of so high a
compliment from such a man.”

Hereford looked relieved, delighted. “I’m glad to have met you, Mr.
Howard, and to have had so satisfactory an interview.”

Again outside the door, he muttered gleefully: “Yes, we’ve him.
Otherwise he would have had his servants kick me down stairs. Gad, no
wonder ---- is on his way to the Presidency, I had a sneaking fear that
this fellow might be sincere. But _he_ saw through him without ever
having seen him. I suppose two men of that stripe instinctively
understand each other.”

       *       *       *       *       *

That was on a Sunday afternoon. On the following Wednesday, as Marian
came into Howard’s sitting-room with the newspapers, she laughed: “I’ve
been reading such a speech from your candidate, you radical! I must
say I liked to read it. It was so like you, your very phrases in many
places, the things you used to talk to me before you gave me up as
hopeless. Just listen.”

And she read him the oration--a reproduction of the Howard she first
saw, the Howard she admired and loved and had never lost. “Isn’t it
superb?” she asked at the end. “You must have written it for him. Don’t
you like it?”

“Very able,” was Howard’s only comment.

Marian continued to read the paper, glancing from column to column,
giving him the substance of the news. Soon she reached the editorial
page. He was stealthily watching her face. He saw her glance through a
few lines of the leader, start, read on, look in a terrified way at him,
and then skip abruptly to the next page.

“Read me the leader, won’t you?” he asked.

“My voice is tired,” she pleaded. “I’ll read it after awhile.”

“Please,” he insisted. “I’m especially anxious to hear it.”

“I think,” she almost stammered, “that somebody has taken advantage
of your illness. I didn’t want to tell you until I’d had a chance to
think.”

“Please read it.” His tone was abrupt. She had never heard that tone
before.

She read. It was an assertion of that which her Howard most disbelieved,
most protested against; a defense of the public corruption she had heard
him denounce so often; an attack upon the ideas, the principles, the
elements she had so often heard him eulogize. It was as adroit as it was
detestable, as plausible as it was unprincipled.

When she had done, there was a long silence which he broke. “What do you
think of it?”

“Only a wretch, an enemy of yours could have written it. Who can it have
been?” Her eyes were ablaze and her voice trembled with anger.

“I wrote it,” he said.

He did not dare to look at her for a few seconds. Then, with a flimsy
mask of pretended calmness only the more clearly revealing self-contempt
and cowardice, he faced her amazed eyes, her pale cheeks, her parted
lips--and dropped his gaze to the floor.

“You?” she whispered. “You?”

“Yes, I.”

She sat so still that he reached over and touched her hand. It was cold.
She shivered and drew it away. They were silent for a long time--several
minutes. She was looking at his face. It was old and sad and
feeble--pitiful, contemptible. She had never seen those lines of
weakness about his mouth before. She had never before noted that his
features had lost the expression of exalted character, the light of free
and independent manhood which made her look again the first time she saw
him. When had the man she loved departed? When had the new man come? How
long had she been giving herself to a stranger--and _such_ a stranger?

“Yes--I,” he repeated. “I have come over to your side.” He laughed and
she shivered again. “Well--what do you think?”

“Think?--I?--Oh, I think----”

She burst into tears, flung herself down at his feet and buried her head
in his lap.

“I think nothing,” she sobbed, “except that I--I love you.”

He fell to smoothing her hair, slowly, gently, patronisingly. His face
was composed and he was looking down at her trembling head and agitated
shoulders with an absent-minded smile. How easily this once
dreaded crisis had passed! How he had overestimated her! How he had
underestimated himself!

His glance and his thoughts soon fastened upon the copy of his newspaper
which she had thrown aside--_his_ newspaper indeed, his creation and his
creature, the epitome of his intellect and character, of his strength
and his weakness. Half a million circulation daily, three quarters of a
million on Sunday--how mighty as a direct influence upon the people! Its
clearness and vigour, its intelligence, its truth-like sophistry--how
mighty as an indirect influence upon the minds of other editors and of
public men! “Power--Success,” he repeated to himself in an exaltation of
vanity and arrogance.

Marian lifted her head and, turning, put it against his knee. She
reached out for his hand. He began to speak at once in a low persuasive
voice:

“Trust me, dear, can’t you? You do not--have not been reading the paper
until recently. You are not interested in politics. There have been many
changes in the few last years. And I too have changed. I am no longer
without responsibilities. They have sobered me, have given me
an appreciation of property, stability, conservatism. Youth is
enthusiastic, theoretical. I have--”

“Ah, but I do trust you,” she interrupted eagerly, fearful lest his
explanations would make it the more difficult for her to convince
herself of what she felt she must believe if life were to go on. “And
you--I don’t want you to excite yourself. You must be quiet--must get
well.”

Each avoided meeting the other’s eyes as she arranged the pillows for
him before leaving him alone to rest.

The longer she juggled with her discovery the less appalling it seemed.
His line of action fitted too closely to her own ambitions of social
distinction, social leadership. If he had been her lover, the shock
would have killed love and set up contempt in its stead. But he was
not her lover, had not been for years; and to find that her husband was
doing a husband’s duty, was winning position and power for himself and
therefore for his wife--that was a disclosure with mitigating aspects at
least. Besides, might she not be in part mistaken? Surely any course so
satisfactory in its results could not be wholly wrong, might perhaps be
the right in an unexpected, unaccustomed form.





XXVIII.

SUCCESS.


French had made a portrait of the new American ambassador to the Court
of St. James and it was shown at the spring exhibition of the Royal
Academy. The ambassador and his wife wished to see how it had been
hung, but they did not wish to be seen. So they chose an early hour of
a chill, rainy May morning to drive in a hansom from their place in Park
Lane to Burlington House.

They found the portrait in Room VI, on the line, in a corner, but where
it had the benefit of such light as there was. When they entered no one
was there; but, as they were standing close to the picture, admiring
the energy and simplicity of the strokes of the master’s brush, a crowd
swept in and enclosed them.

“Let us go,” Howard said in a low tone.

Just then a man, almost at his shoulder because of the pressure of those
behind, said: “Wonderful, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a better example of
his work. He had a subject that suited him perfectly.”

“No, let us stay,” Marian whispered in reply to her husband. “They can’t
see our faces and I’d like to hear.”

“Yes, it is superb,” came the answer to the man behind them in a voice
unmistakably American. “Now, tell me, Saverhill, what sort of a person
would you say the ambassador is from that picture? You don’t know him?”

“Never heard of him until I read of his appointment,” replied the first
voice.

“I’ve heard of him often enough,” came in the American voice. “But I’ve
never seen him.”

“You know him now,” resumed the Englishman, “inside as well as out.
French always paints what he sees and always sees what he’s painting.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Let us go,” whispered Marian. But Howard did not heed her.

“I see--a fallen man. He was evidently a real man once; but he sold
himself.”

“Yes? Where does it show?”

“He’s got a good mind, this fellow-countryman of yours. There are the
eyes of a thinker and a doer. Nothing could have kept him down. His face
is almost as relentless as Kitchener’s and fully as aggressive, except
that it shows intellect, and Kitchener’s doesn’t. Now note the corners
of his eyes, Marshall, and his mouth and nostrils and chin, and you’ll
see why he sold himself, and the--the consequences.”

Howard and Marian, fascinated, compelled, looked where the unknown
requested.

“I think I see what you mean,” came in Marshall’s voice, laughingly.
“But go on.”

“Ah, there it all is--hypocrisy, vanity, lack of principle, and,
plainest of all, weakness. It’s a common enough type among your
successful men. The man himself is the fixed market price for a certain
kind of success. But, according to French, this ambassador of yours
seems to know what he has paid; and the knowledge doesn’t make him more
content with his bargain. He has more brains than vanity; therefore he’s
an unhappy hypocrite instead of a happy self-deceiver.”

Howard and Marian shrunk together with their heads close in the effort
to make sure of concealing their faces. She was suffering for herself,
but more acutely for him. She knew, as if she were looking into his
mind, his frightful humiliation. “Hereafter,” she thought, “whenever any
one looks at him he will feel the thought behind the look.”

“How nearly did I come to him?” asked Saverhill.

Howard started and Marian caught the rail for support.

“A centre-shot,” replied Marshall, “if the people who know him and have
talked to me about him tell the truth.”

“Oh, they’re ‘on to’ him, as you say, over there, are they?”

“No, not everybody. Only his friends and the few who are on the inside.
There’s an ugly story going about privately as to how he got the
ambassadorship. They say he was bought with it. But--he’s admired and
envied even by a good many who know or suspect that he’s only an article
of commerce. He’s got the cash and he’s got position; and his paper
gives him tremendous power. Then too, as you say, all about him there
are men like himself. The only punishment he’s likely to get is the
penalty of having to live with himself.”

“A good, round price if French is not mistaken,” replied Saverhill.

The two men passed on. Howard and Marian looked guiltily about, then
slipped away in the opposite direction. He helped her into the waiting
hansom. As they were driven homeward she cast a stealthy side-glance at
him.

“Yes,” she thought, “the portrait is a portrait of his face; and his
face is a portrait of himself.”

He caught her glance in the little mirror in the side of the
hansom--caught it and read it. And he began to hate her, this instrument
to his punishment, this constant remembrancer of his downfall.










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