CHAPTER VI
Such members of the Brashear household as chose to accommodate themselves strictly to the hour could have eight o’clock breakfast in the basement dining-room for the modest consideration of thirty cents; thirty-five with special cream-jug. At these gatherings, usually attended by half a dozen of the lodgers, matters of local interest were weightily discussed; such as the progress of the subway excavations, the establishment of a new Italian restaurant in 11th Street, or the calling away of the fourth-floor-rear by the death of an uncle who would perhaps leave him money. To this sedate assemblage descended one crisp December morning young Wickert, clad in the natty outline of a new Bernholz suit, and obviously swollen with tidings.
“Whaddya know about the latest?” he flung forth upon the coffee-scented air.
“The latest” in young Wickert’s compendium of speech might be the garments adorning his trim person, the current song-hit of a vaudeville to which he had recently contributed his critical attention, or some tidbit of purely local gossip. Hainer, the plump and elderly accountant, opined that Wickert had received an augmentation of salary, and got an austere frown for his sally. Evidently Wickert deemed his news to be of special import; he was quite bloated, conversationally. He now dallied with it.
“Since when have you been taking in disguised millionaires, Mrs. Brashear?”
The presiding genius of the house, divided between professional resentment at even so remotely slurring an implication (for was not the Grove Street house good enough for any millionaire, undisguised!) and human curiosity, requested an explanation.
“I was in Sherry’s restaurant last night,” said the offhand Wickert.
“I didn’t read about any fire there,” said the jocose Hainer, pointing his sally with a wink at Lambert, the art-student.
Wickert ignored the gibe. Such was the greatness of his tidings that he could afford to.
“Our firm was giving a banquet to some buyers and big folks in the trade. Private room upstairs; music, flowers, champagne by the case. We do things in style when we do ’em. They sent me up after hours with an important message to our Mr. Webler; he was in charge of arrangements.”
“Been promoted to be messenger, ay?” put in Mr. Hainer, chuckling.
“When I came downstairs,” continued the other with only a venomous glance toward the seat of the scorner, “I thought to myself what’s the matter with taking a look at the swells feeding in the big restaurant. You may not know it, people, but Sherry’s is the ree-churchiest place in Nuh Yawk to eat dinner. It’s got ’em all beat. So I stopped at the door and took ’em in. Swell? Oh, you dolls! I stood there trying to work up the nerve to go in and siddown and order a plate of stew or something that wouldn’t stick me more’n a dollar, just to say I’d been dining at Sherry’s, when I looked across the room, and whadda you think?” He paused, leaned forward, and shot out the climactic word, “Banneker!”
“Having his dinner there?” asked the incredulous but fascinated Mrs. Brashear.
“Like he owned the place. Table to himself, against the wall. Waiter fussin’ over him like he loved him. And dressed! Oh, Gee!”
“Did you speak to him?” asked Lambert.
“He spoke to me,” answered Wickert, dealing in subtle distinctions. “He was just finishing his coffee when I sighted him. Gave the waiter haffa dollar. I could see it on the plate. There I was at the door, and he said, ‘Why, hello, Wickert. Come and have a liquor.’ He pronounced it a queer, Frenchy way. So I said thanks, I’d have a highball.”
“Didn’t he seem surprised to see you there?” asked Hainer.
Wickert paid an unconscious tribute to good-breeding. “Banneker’s the kind of feller that wouldn’t show it if he was surprised. He couldn’t have been as surprised as I was, at that. We went to the bar and had a drink, and then I ast him what’d he, have on me, and all the time I was sizing him up. I’m telling you, he looked like he’d grown up in Sherry’s.”
The rest of the conversation, it appeared from Mr. Wickert’s spirited sketch, had consisted mainly in eager queries from himself, and good-humored replies by the other.
Did Banneker eat there every night?
Oh, no! He wasn’t up to that much of a strain on his finances.
But the waiters seemed to know him, as if he was one of the regulars.
In a sense he was. Every Monday he dined there. Monday was his day off.
Well, Mr. Wickert (awed and groping) would be damned! All alone?
Banneker, smiling, admitted the solitude. He rather liked dining alone.
Oh, Wickert couldn’t see that at all! Give him a pal and a coupla lively girls, say from the Ladies’ Tailor-Made Department, good-lookers and real dressers; that was his idea of a dinner, though he’d never tried it at Sherry’s. Not that he couldn’t if he felt like it. How much did they stick you for a good feed-out with a cocktail and maybe a bottle of Italian Red?
Well, of course, that depended on which way was Wickert going? Could Banneker set him on his way? He was taking a taxi to the Avon Theater, where there was an opening.
Did Mr. Banneker (Wickert had by this time attained the “Mr.” stage) always follow up his dinner at Sherry’s with a theater?
Usually, if there were an opening. If not he went to the opera or a concert.
For his part, Wickert liked a little more spice in life. Still, every feller to his tastes. And Mr. Banneker was sure dressed for the part. Say—if he didn’t mind—who made that full-dress suit?
No; of course he didn’t mind. Mertoun made it.
After which Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat, worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop immediately after leaving Banneker. A dollar apiece! No, he had not accepted the offer of a lift, being doubtful upon the point of honor as to whether he would be expected to pay a pro rata of the taxi charge. They, the assembled breakfast company, had his permission to call him, Mr. Wickert, a goat if Mr. Banneker wasn’t the swellest-looking guy he had anywhere seen on that memorable evening.
Nobody called Mr. Wickert a goat. But Mr. Hainer sniffed and said:
“And him a twenty-five-dollar-a-week reporter!”
“Perhaps he has private means,” suggested little Miss Westlake, who had her own reasons for suspecting this: reasons bolstered by many and frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped, the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary quality. Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a practical way. Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work, untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:
“I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company.”
“Maybe not,” answered the cynical Lambert. “But where does he get it? I ask you!”
“Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his obligations,” declared Mrs. Brashear.
“But what’s he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry’s?” marveled young Wickert.
“Wyncha ask him?” brutally demanded Hainer.
Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt “skittish” about it. Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, “Ask him yourself.”
Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear’s on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went to Sherry’s and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer; Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave formalism of Sherry’s than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.
Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.
He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a “complex of inferiority.” In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.
Sherry’s and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the people, as such, who were hardly more than, “walking ladies and gentlemen” in a mise-en-scène. Indeed, where minor opportunities offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them. Banneker did not desire to know people—yet. When he should arrive at the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.
It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him. Sherry’s was crowded, and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining with a mixed party of a dozen. Presently Cressey came over.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked, shaking hands. “Haven’t seen you for months.”
“Working,” replied Banneker. “Sit down and have a cocktail. Two, Jules,” he added to the attentive waiter.
“I guess they can spare me for five minutes,” agreed Cressey, glancing back at his forsaken place. “This isn’t what you call work, though, is it?”
“Hardly. This is my day off.”
“Oh! And how goes the job?”
“Well enough.”
“I’d think so,” commented the other, taking in the general effect of Banneker’s easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant. “You don’t own this place, do you?” he added.
From another member of the world which had inherited or captured Sherry’s as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been offensive. But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.
“Not exactly,” he returned lightly. “Do I give that unfortunate impression?”
“You give very much the impression of owning old Jules—or he does—and having a proprietary share in the new head waiter. Are you here much?”
“Monday evenings, only.”
“This is a good cocktail,” observed Cressey, savoring it expertly. “Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you that outfit?”
“Yes.”
“Then I quit him,” declared the gilded youth.
“Why? Isn’t it all right?”
“All right! Dammit, it’s a better job than ever I got out of him,” returned his companion indignantly. “Some change from the catalogue suit you sported when you landed here! You know how to wear ’em; I’ve got to say that for you.... I’ve got to get back. When’ll you dine with me? I want to hear all about it.”
“Any Monday,” answered Banneker.
Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.
“Who’s the wonderful-looking foreigner?”
“He isn’t a foreigner. At least not very much.”
“He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know,” said one of the women. “One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that preserves the Roman mould. Isn’t he an Italian?”
“He’s an American. I ran across him out in the desert country.”
“Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?”
Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. “He was in the railroad business,” he returned cautiously. “His name is Banneker.”
“I’ve been seeing him for months,” remarked another of the company. “He’s always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He’s a mystery.”
“He’s a beauty,” said Cressey’s left-hand neighbor.
Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray, and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion. Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important trifles.
“In the West, Bertie?” she inquired of Cressey. “You were in that big wreck there, weren’t you?”
“Devil of a wreck,” said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what Esther might know or might not say.
“Ask him over here,” directed that young lady blandly, “for coffee and liqueurs.”
“Oh, I say!” protested one of the men. “Nobody knows anything about him—”
“He’s a friend of mine,” put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that particular objection. “But I don’t think he’d come.”
Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.
“All right, I’ll try,” yielded Cressey, rising.
“Put him next to me,” directed Miss Forbes.
The emissary visited Banneker’s table, was observed to be in brief colloquy with him, and returned, alone.
“Wouldn’t he come?” interrogated the chorus.
“He’s awfully sorry, but he says he isn’t fit for decent human associations.”
“More and more interesting!”—“Why?”—“What awful thing has he been doing?”
“Eating onions,” answered Cressey. “Raw.”
“I don’t believe it,” cried the indignant Miss Forbes. “One doesn’t eat raw onions at Sherry’s. It’s a subterfuge.”
“Very likely.”
“If I went over there myself, who’ll bet a dozen silk stockings that I can’t—”
“Come off it, Ess,” protested her brother-in-law across the table. “That’s too high a jump, even for you.”
She let herself be dissuaded, but her dovelike eyes were vagrant during the rest of the dinner.
Pleasantly musing over the last glass of a good but moderate-priced Rosemont-Geneste, Banneker became aware of Cressey’s dinner party filing past him: then of Jules, the waiter, discreetly murmuring something, from across the table. A faint and provocative scent came to his nostrils, and as he followed Jules’s eyes he saw a feminine figure standing at his elbow. He rose promptly and looked down into a face which might have been modeled for a type of appealing innocence.
“You’re Mr. Banneker, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Esther Forbes, and I think I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“It doesn’t seem probable,” he replied gravely.
“From a cousin of mine,” pursued the girl. “She was Io Welland. Haven’t I?”
A shock went through Banneker at the mention of the name. But he steadied himself to say: “I don’t think so.”
Herein he was speaking by the letter. Knowing Io Welland as he had, he deemed it very improbable that she had even so much as mentioned him to any of her friends. In that measure, at least, he believed, she would have respected the memory of the romance which she had so ruthlessly blasted. This girl, with the daring and wistful eyes, was simply fishing, so he guessed.
His guess was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes’s easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain pattern. Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven abortive. Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her marriage, must be something out of the ordinary. Instinct of womankind told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such a miracle.
“But you did know Io?” she persisted, feeling, as she afterward confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.
The lion did not bite her head off. He did not even roar. He merely said, “Yes.”
“In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?”
“Something of that sort.”
“Are you awfully bored and wishing I’d go away and let you alone?” she said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance. “Because if you are, don’t make such heroic efforts to conceal it.”
At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul of Miss Forbes. “No,” he said equably, “I’m interested to discover how far you’ll go.”
The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.
“Oh, as far as you’ll let me,” she answered. “Did you ride in from your ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?”
“My ranch? I wasn’t on a ranch.”
“Please, sir,” she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, “what did you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole week, though we didn’t know your name?”
“I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists of the killed and injured,” answered Banneker dryly.
“Station-agent!” The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never determined, to New York. “Were you the station-agent?”
“I was.”
She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon himself than upon his apparel. “And what are you now? President of the road?”
“A reporter on The Ledger.”
“Really!” This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous information. “What are you reporting here?”
“I’m off duty to-night.”
“I see. Could you get off duty some afternoon and come to tea, if I’ll promise to have Io there to meet you?”
“Your party seems to be making signals of distress, Miss Forbes.”
“That’s the normal attitude of my friends and family toward me. You’ll come, won’t you, Mr. Banneker?”
“Thank you: but reporting keeps one rather too busy for amusement.”
“You won’t come,” she murmured, aggrieved. “Then it is true about you and Io.”
This time she achieved a result. Banneker flushed angrily, though he said, coolly enough: “I think perhaps you would make an enterprising reporter, yourself, Miss Forbes.”
“I’m sure I should. Well, I’ll apologize. And if you won’t come for Io—she’s still abroad, by the way and won’t be back for a month—perhaps you’ll come for me. Just to show that you forgive my impertinences. Everybody does. I’m going to tell Bertie Cressey he must bring you.... All right, Bertie! I wish you wouldn’t follow me up like—like a paper-chase. Good-night, Mr. Banneker.”
To her indignant escort she declared that it couldn’t have hurt them to wait a jiffy; that she had had a most amusing conversation; that Mr. Banneker was as charming as he was good to look at; and that (in answer to sundry questions) she had found out little or nothing, though she hoped for better results in future.
“But he’s Io’s passion-in-the-desert right enough,” said the irreverent Miss Forbes.
Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had fought maddening memories of Io’s shadowed eyes, of the exhalant, irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard against the recurrent thoughts of her.
Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.
CHAPTER VII
“Katie’s” sits, sedate and serviceable, on a narrow side street so near to Park Row that the big table in the rear rattles its dishes when the presses begin their seismic rumblings, in the daily effort to shake the world. Here gather the pick and choice of New York journalism, while still on duty, to eat and drink and discuss the inner news of things which is so often much more significant than the published version; haply to win or lose a few swiftly earned dollars at pass-three hearts. It is the unofficial press club of Newspaper Row.
Said McHale of The Sphere, who, having been stuck with the queen of spades—that most unlucky thirteener—twice in succession, was retiring on his losses, to Mallory of The Ledger who had just come in:
“I hear you’ve got a sucking genius at your shop.”
“If you mean Banneker, he’s weaned,” replied the assistant city editor of The Ledger. “He goes on space next week.”
“Does he, though! Quick work, eh?”
“A record for the office. He’s been on the staff less than a year.”
“Is he really such a wonder?” asked Glidden of The Monitor.
Three or four Ledger men answered at once, citing various stories which had stirred the interest of Park Row.
“Oh, you Ledger fellows are always giving the college yell for each other,” said McHale, impatiently voicing the local jealousy of The Ledger’s recognized esprit de corps. “I’ve seen bigger rockets than him come down in the ash-heap.”
“He won’t,” prophesied Tommy Burt, The Ledger’s humorous specialist. “He’ll go up and stay up. High! He’s got the stuff.”
“They say,” observed Fowler, the star man of The Patriot, “he covers his assignment in taxicabs.”
“He gets the news,” murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.
“And he writes it,” put in Van Cleve of The Courier. “Lord, how that boy can write! Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed in black-face.”
“I’ve never seen him around,” remarked Glidden. “What does he do with himself besides work?”
“Nothing, I imagine,” answered Mallory. “One of the cubs reports finding him at the Public Library, before ten o’clock in the morning, surrounded by books on journalism. He’s a serious young owl.”
“It doesn’t get into his copy, then,” asserted “Parson” Gale, political expert for The Ledger.
“Nor into his appearance. He certainly dresses like a flower of the field. Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced Fifth Avenue.”
“Must be rich,” surmised Fowler. “Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue raiment sound like real money.”
“Nobody knows where he got it, then,” said Tommy Burt. “Used to be a freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly. When he arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the hair. Some change and sudden!”
“Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn’t he?” asked Van Cleve. “I hear he’s beginning to pick his assignments already. Refuses to take society stuff and that sort of thing.”
“Oh,” said Mallory, “I suppose that comes from his being assigned to a tea given by the Thatcher Forbes for some foreign celebrity, and asking to be let off because he’d already been invited there and declined.”
“Hello!” exclaimed McHale. “Where does our young bird come in to fly as high as the Thatcher Forbes? He may look like a million dollars, but is he?”
“All I know,” said Tommy Burt, “is that every Monday, which is his day off, he dines at Sherry’s, and goes in lonely glory to a first-night, if there is one, afterward. It must have been costing him half of his week’s salary.”
“Swelled head, sure,” diagnosed Decker, the financial reporter of The Ledger. “Well, watch the great Chinese joss, Greenough, pull the props from under him when the time comes.”
“As how?” inquired Glidden.
“By handing him a nawsty one out of the assignment book, just to show him where his hat fits too tight.”
“A run of four-line obits,” suggested Van Cleve, who had passed a painful apprenticeship of death-notices in which is neither profitable space nor hopeful opportunity, “for a few days, will do it.”
“Or the job of asking an indignant millionaire papa why his pet daughter ran away with the second footman and where.”
“Or interviewing old frozen-faced Willis Enderby on his political intentions, honorable or dishonorable.”
“If I know Banneker,” said Mallory, “he’s game. He’ll take what’s handed him and put it over.”
“Once, maybe,” contributed Tommy Burt. “Twice, perhaps. But I wouldn’t want to crowd too much on him.”
“Greenough won’t. He’s wise in the ways of marvelous and unlicked cubs,” said Decker.
“Why? What do you think Banneker would do?” asked Mallory curiously, addressing Burt.
“If he got an assignment too rich for his stomach? Well, speaking unofficially and without special knowledge, I’d guess that he’d handle it to a finish, and then take his very smart and up-to-date hat and perform a polite adieu to Mr. Greenough and all the works of The Ledger city room.”
A thin, gray, somnolent elder at the end of the table, whose nobly cut face was seared with lines of physical pain endured and outlived, withdrew a very small pipe from his mouth and grunted.
“The Venerable Russell Edmonds has the floor,” said Tommy Burt in a voice whose open raillery subtly suggested an underlying affection and respect. “He snorts, and in that snort is sublimated the wisdom and experience of a ripe ninety years on Park Row. Speak, O Compendium of all the—”
“Shut up, Tommy,” interrupted Edmonds. He resumed his pipe, gave it two anxious puffs, and, satisfied of its continued vitality, said:
“Banneker, uh? Resign, uh? You think he would?”
“I think so.”
“Does he think so?”
“That’s my belief.”
“He won’t,” pronounced the veteran with finality. “They never do. They chafe. They strain. They curse out the job and themselves. They say it isn’t fit for any white man. So it isn’t, the worst of it. But they stick. If they’re marked for it, they stick.”
“Marked for it?” murmured Glidden.
“The ink-spot. The mark of the beast. I’ve got it. You’ve got it, Glidden, and you, McHale. Mallory’s smudged with it. Tommy thinks it’s all over him, but it isn’t. He’ll end between covers. Fiction, like as not,” he added with a mildly contemptuous smile. “But this young Banneker; it’s eaten into him like acid.”
“Do you know him, Pop?” inquired McHale.
“Never saw him. Don’t have to. I’ve read his stuff.”
“And you see it there?”
“Plain as Brooklyn Bridge. He’ll eat mud like the rest of us.”
“Come off, Pop! Where do you come in to eat mud? You’ve got the creamiest job on Park Row. You never have to do anything that a railroad president need shy at.”
This was nearly true. Edmonds, who in his thirty years of service had filled almost every conceivable position from police headquarters reporter to managing editor, had now reverted to the phase for which the ink-spot had marked him, and was again a reporter; a sort of super-reporter, spending much of his time out around the country on important projects either of news, or of that special information necessary to a great daily, which does not always appear as news, but which may define, determine, or alter news and editorial policies.
Of him it was said on Park Row, and not without reason, that he was bigger than his paper, which screened him behind a traditional principle of anonymity, for The Courier was of the second rank in metropolitan journalism and wavered between an indigenous Bourbonism and a desire to be thought progressive. The veteran’s own creed was frankly socialistic; but in the Fabian phase. His was a patient philosophy, content with slow progress; but upon one point he was a passionate enthusiast. He believed in the widest possible scope of education, and in the fundamental duty of the press to stimulate it.
“We’ll get the Social Revolution just as soon as we’re educated up to it,” he was wont to declare. “If we get it before then, it’ll be a worse hash than capitalism. So let’s go slow and learn.”
For such a mind to be contributing to an organ of The Courier type might seem anomalous. Often Edmonds accused himself of shameful compromise; the kind of compromise constantly necessary to hold his place. Yet it was not any consideration of self-interest that bound him. He could have commanded higher pay in half a dozen open positions. Or, he could have afforded to retire, and write as he chose, for he had been a shrewd investor with wide opportunities. What really held him was his ability to forward almost imperceptibly through the kind of news political and industrial, which he, above all other journalists of his day, was able to determine and analyze, the radical projects dear to his heart. Nothing could have had a more titillating appeal to his sardonic humor than the furious editorial refutations in The Courier, of facts and tendencies plainly enunciated by him in the news columns.
Nevertheless, his impotency to speak out openly and individually the faith that was in him, left always a bitter residue in his mind. It now informed his answer to Van Cleve’s characterization of his job.
“If I can sneak a tenth of the truth past the copy-desk,” he said, “I’m doing well. And what sort of man am I when I go up against these big-bugs of industry at their conventions, and conferences, appearing as representative of The Courier which represents their interests? A damned hypocrite, I’d say! If they had brains enough to read between the lines of my stuff, they’d see it.”
“Why don’t you tell ’em?” asked Mallory lazily.
“I did, once. I told the President of the United Manufacturers’ Association what I really thought of their attitude toward labor.”
“With what result?”
“He ordered The Courier to fire me.”
“You’re still there.”
“Yes. But he isn’t. I went after him on his record.”
“All of which doesn’t sound much like mud-eating, Pop.”
“I’ve done my bit of that in my time, too. I’ve had jobs to do that a self-respecting swill-hustler wouldn’t touch. I’ve sworn I wouldn’t do em. And I’ve done ’em, rather than lose my job. Just as young Banneker will, when the test comes.”
“I’ll bet he won’t,” said Tommy Burt.
Mallory, who had been called away, returned in time to hear this. “You might ask him to settle the bet,” he suggested. “I’ve just had him on the ‘phone. He’s coming around.”
“I will,” said Edmonds.
On his arrival Banneker was introduced to those of the men whom he did not know, and seated next to Edmonds.
“We’ve been talking about you, young fellow,” said the veteran.
From most men Banneker would have found the form of address patronizing. But the thin, knotty face of Edmonds was turned upon him with so kindly a regard in the hollow eyes that he felt an innate stir of knowledge that here was a man who might be a friend. He made no answer, however, merely glancing at the speaker. To learn that the denizens of Park Row were discussing him, caused him neither surprise nor elation. While he knew that he had made hit after hit with his work, he was not inclined to over-value the easily won reputation. Edmonds’s next remark did not please him.
“We were discussing how much dirt you’d eat to hold your job on The Ledger.”
“The Ledger doesn’t ask its men to eat dirt, Edmonds,” put in Mallory sharply.
“Chop, fried potatoes, coffee, and a stein of Nicklas-brau,” Banneker specified across the table to the waiter. He studied the mimeographed bill-of-fare with selective attention. “And a slice of apple pie,” he decided. Without change of tone, he looked up over the top of the menu at Edmonds slowly puffing his insignificant pipe and said: “I don’t like your assumption, Mr. Edmonds.”
“It’s ugly,” admitted the other, “but you have to answer it. Oh, not to me!” he added, smiling. “To yourself.”
“It hasn’t come my way yet.”
“It will. Ask any of these fellows. We’ve all had to meet it. Yes; you, too, Mallory. We’ve all had to eat our peck of dirt in the sacred name of news. Some are too squeamish. They quit.”
“If they’re too squeamish, they’d never make real newspaper men,” pronounced McHale. “You can’t be too good for your business.”
“Just so,” said Tommy Burt acidly, “but your business can be too bad for you.”
“There’s got to be news. And if there’s got to be news there have got to be men willing to do hard, unpleasant work, to get it,” argued Mallory.
“Hard? All right,” retorted Edmonds. “Unpleasant? Who cares! I’m talking about the dirty work. Wait a minute, Mallory. Didn’t you ever have an assignment that was an outrage on some decent man’s privacy? Or, maybe woman’s? Something that made you sick at your stomach to have to do? Did you ever have to take a couple of drinks to give you nerve to ask some question that ought to have got you kicked downstairs for asking?”
Mallory, flushing angrily, was silent. But McHale spoke up. “Hell! Every business has its stinks, I guess. What about being a lawyer and serving papers? Or a manufacturer and having to bootlick the buyers? I tell you, if the public wants a certain kind of news, it’s the newspaper’s business to serve it to ’em; and it’s the newspaper man’s business to get it for his paper. I say it’s up to the public.”
“The public,” murmured Edmonds. “Swill-eaters.”
“All right! Then give ’em the kind of swill they want,” cried McHale.
Edmonds so manipulated his little pipe that it pointed directly at Banneker. “Would you?” he asked.
“Would I what?”
“Give ’em the kind of swill they want? You seem to like to keep your hands clean.”
“Aren’t you asking me your original question in another form?” smiled the young man.
“You objected to it before.”
“I’ll answer it now. A friend of mine wrote to me when I went on The Ledger, advising me always to be ready on a moment’s notice to look my job between the eyes and tell it to go to hell.”
“Yes; I’ve known that done, too,” interpolated Mallory. “But in those cases it isn’t the job that goes.” He pushed back his chair. “Don’t let Pop Edmonds corrupt you with his pessimism, Banneker,” he warned. “He doesn’t mean half of it.”
“Under the seal of the profession,” said the veteran. “If there were outsiders present, it would be different. I’d have to admit that ours is the greatest, noblest, most high-minded and inspired business in the world. Free and enlightened press. Fearless defender of the right. Incorruptible agent of the people’s will. Did I say ‘people’s will’ or people’s swill’? Don’t ask me!”
The others paid their accounts and followed Mallory out, leaving Banneker alone at the table with the saturnine elder. Edmonds put a thumbful of tobacco in his pipe, and puffed silently.
“What will it get a man?” asked Banneker, setting down his coffee-cup.
“This game?” queried the other.
“Yes.”
“‘What shall it profit a man,’” quoted the veteran ruminatively. “You know the rest.”
“No,” returned Banneker decidedly. “That won’t do. These fellows here haven’t sold their souls.”
“Or lost ’em. Maybe not,” admitted the elder. “Though I wouldn’t gamble strong on some of ’em. But they’ve lost something.”
“Well, what is it? That’s what I’m trying to get at.”
“Independence. They’re merged in the paper they write for.”
“Every man’s got to subordinate himself to his business, if he’s to do justice to it and himself, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. If you’re buying or selling stocks or socks, it doesn’t matter. The principles you live by aren’t involved. In the newspaper game they are.”
“Not in reporting, though.”
“If reporting were just gathering facts and presenting them, it wouldn’t be so. But you’re deep enough in by now to see that reporting of a lot of things is a matter of coloring your version to the general policy of your paper. Politics, for instance, or the liquor question, or labor troubles. The best reporters get to doing it unconsciously. Chameleons.”
“And you think it affects them?”
“How can it help? There’s a slow poison in writing one way when you believe another.”
“And that’s part of the dirt-eating?”
“Well, yes. Not so obvious as some of the other kinds. Those hurt your pride, mostly. This kind hurts your self-respect.”
“But where does it get you, all this business?” asked Banneker reverting to his first query.
“I’m fifty-two years old,” replied Edmonds quietly.
Banneker stared. “Oh, I see!” he said presently. “And you’re considered a success. Of course you are a success.”
“On Park Row. Would you like to be me? At fifty-two?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Banneker with a frankness which brought a faint smile to the other man’s tired face. “Yet you’ve got where you started for, haven’t you?”
“Perhaps I could answer that if I knew where I started for or where I’ve got to.”
“Put it that you’ve got what you were after, then.”
“No’s the answer. Upper-case No. I want to get certain things over to the public intelligence. Maybe I’ve got one per cent of them over. Not more.”
“That’s something. To have a public that will follow you even part way—”
“Follow me? Bless you; they don’t know me except as a lot of print that they occasionally read. I’m as anonymous as an editorial writer. And that’s the most anonymous thing there is.”
“That doesn’t suit me at all,” declared Banneker. “If I have got anything in me—and I think I have—I don’t want it to make a noise like a part of a big machine. I’d rather make a small noise of my own.”
“Buy a paper, then. Or write fluffy criticisms about art or theaters. Or get into the magazine field. You can write; O Lord! yes, you can write. But unless you’ve got the devotion of a fanatic like McHale, or a born servant of the machine like ‘Parson’ Gale, or an old fool like me, willing to sink your identity in your work, you’ll never be content as a reporter.”
“Tell me something. Why do none of the men, talking among themselves, ever refer to themselves as reporters. It’s always ‘newspaper men.’”
Edmonds shot a swift glance at him. “What do you think?”
“I think,” he decided slowly, “it’s because there is a sort of stigma attached to reporting.”
“Damn you, you’re right!” snapped the veteran. “Though it’s the rankest heresy to admit it. There’s a taint about it. There’s a touch of the pariah. We try to fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t. But it’s there, and we admit it when we use a clumsy, misfit term like ‘newspaper man.’”
“Whose fault is it?”
“The public’s. The public is a snob. It likes to look down on brains. Particularly the business man. That’s why I’m a Socialist. I’m ag’in the bourgeoisie.”
“Aren’t the newspapers to blame, in the kind of stuff they print?”
“And why do they print it?” demanded the other fiercely. “Because the public wants all the filth and scandal and invasion of privacy that it can get and still feel respectable.”
“The Ledger doesn’t go in for that sort of thing.”
“Not as much as some of the others. But a little more each year. It follows the trend.” He got up, quenched his pipe, and reached for his hat. “Drop in here about seven-thirty when you feel like hearing the old man maunder,” he said with his slight, friendly smile.
Rising, Banneker leaned over to him. “Who’s the man at the next table?” he asked in a low voice, indicating a tall, broad, glossily dressed diner who was sipping his third demi-tasse, in apparent detachment from the outside world.
“His name is Marrineal,” replied the veteran. “He dines here occasionally alone. Don’t know what he does.”
“He’s been listening in.”
“Curious thing; he often does.”
As they parted at the door, Edmonds said paternally:
“Remember, young fellow, a Park Row reputation is written on glass with a wet finger. It doesn’t last during the writing.”
“And only dims the glass,” said Banneker reflectively.