CHAPTER VIII
Heat, sudden, savage, and oppressive, bore down upon the city early that spring, smiting men in their offices, women in their homes, the horses between the shafts of their toil, so that the city was in danger of becoming disorganized. The visitation developed into the big story of successive days. It was the sort of generalized, picturesque “fluff-stuff” matter which Banneker could handle better than his compeers by sheer imaginative grasp and deftness of presentation. Being now a writer on space, paid at the rate of eight dollars a column of from thirteen to nineteen hundred words, he found the assignment profitable and the test of skill quite to his taste. Soft job though it was in a way, however, the unrelenting pressure of the heat and the task of finding, day after day, new phases and fresh phrases in which to deal with it, made inroads upon his nerves.
He took to sleeping ill again. Io Welland had come back in all the glamorous panoply of waking dreams to command and torment his loneliness of spirit. At night he dreaded the return to the draughtless room on Grove Street. In the morning, rising sticky-eyed and unrested, he shrank from the thought of the humid, dusty, unkempt hurly-burly of the office. Yet his work was never more brilliant and individual.
Having finished his writing, one reeking midnight, he sat, spent, at his desk, hating the thought of the shut-in place that he called home. Better to spend the night on a bench in some square, as he had done often enough in the earlier days. He rose, took his hat, and had reached the first landing when the steps wavered and faded in front of him and he found himself clutching for the rail. A pair of hands gripped his shoulders and held him up.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Banneker?” asked a voice.
“God!” muttered Banneker. “I wish I were back on the desert.”
“You want a drink,” prescribed his volunteer prop.
As his vision and control reestablished themselves, Banneker found himself being led downstairs and to the nearest bar by young Fentriss Smith, who ordered two soda cocktails.
Of Smith he knew little except that the office called him “the permanent twenty-five-dollar man.” He was one of those earnest, faithful, totally uninspired reporters, who can be relied upon implicitly for routine news, but are constitutionally impotent to impart color and life to any subject whatsoever. Patiently he had seen younger and newer men overtake and pass him; but he worked on inexorably, asking for nothing, wearing the air of a scholar with some distant and abstruse determination in view. Like Banneker he had no intimates in the office.
“The desert,” echoed Smith in his quiet, well-bred voice. “Isn’t it pretty hot, there, too?”
“It’s open,” said Banneker. “I’m smothering here.”
“You look frazzled out, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I feel frazzled out; that’s what I mind.”
“Suppose you come out with me to-night as soon as I report to the desk,” suggested the other.
Banneker, refreshed by the tingling drink, looked down at him in surprise. “Where?” he asked.
“I’ve got a little boat out here in the East River.”
“A boat? Lord, that sounds good!” sighed Banneker.
“Does it? Then see here! Why couldn’t you put in a few days with me, and cool off? I’ve often wanted to talk to you about the newspaper business, and get your ideas.”
“But I’m newer at it than you are.”
“For a fact! Just the same you’ve got the trick of it and I haven’t. I’ll go around to your place while you pack a suitcase, and we’re off.”
“That’s very good of you.” Accustomed though he was to the swift and ready comradeship of a newspaper office, Banneker was puzzled by this advance from the shy and remote Smith. “All right: if you’ll let me share expenses,” he said presently.
Smith seemed taken aback at this. “Just as you like,” he assented. “Though I don’t quite know—We’ll talk of that later.”
While Banneker was packing in his room, Smith, seated on the window-sill, remarked:
“I ought to tell you that we have to go through a bad district to get there.”
“The Tunnel Gang?” asked Banneker, wise in the plague spots of the city.
“Just this side of their stamping ground. It’s a gang of wharf rats. There have been a number of hold-ups, and last week a dead woman was found under the pier.”
Banneker made an unobtrusive addition to his packing. “They’ll have to move fast to catch me,” he observed.
“Two of us together won’t be molested. But if you’re alone, be careful. The police in that precinct are no good. They’re either afraid or they stand in with the gang.”
On Fifth Avenue the pair got a late-cruising taxicab whose driver, however, declined to take them nearer than one block short of the pier. “The night air in that place ain’t good fer weak constitutions,” he explained. “One o’ my pals got a headache last week down on the pier from bein’ beaned with a sandbag.”
No one interfered with the two reporters, however. A whistle from the end of the pier evolved from the watery dimness a dinghy, which, in a hundred yards of rowing, delivered them into a small but perfectly appointed yacht. Banneker, looking about the luxurious cabin, laughed a little.
“That was a bad guess of mine about half expenses,” he said good-humoredly. “I’d have to mortgage my future for a year. Do you own this craft?”
“My father does. He’s been called back West.”
Bells rang, the wheel began to churn, and Banneker, falling asleep in his berth with a vivifying breeze blowing across him, awoke in broad daylight to a view of sparkling little waves which danced across his vision to smack impudently the flanks of the speeding craft.
“We’ll be in by noon,” was Smith’s greeting as they met on the companionway for a swim.
“What do you do it for?” asked Banneker, seated at the breakfast table, with an appetite such as he had not known for weeks.
“Do what?”
“Two men’s work at twenty-five per for The Ledger?”
“Training.”
“Are you going to stick to the business?”
“The family,” explained Smith, “own a newspaper in Toledo. It fell to them by accident. Our real business is manufacturing farm machinery, and none of us has ever tried or thought of manufacturing newspapers. So they wished on me the job of learning how.”
“Do you like it?”
“Not particularly. But I’m going through with it.”
Banneker felt a new and surprised respect for his host. He could forecast the kind of small city newspaper that Smith would make; careful, conscientious, regular in politics, loyal to what it deemed the best interests of the community, single-minded in its devotion to the Smith family and its properties; colorless, characterless, and without vision or leadership in all that a newspaper should, according to Banneker’s opinion, stand for. So he talked with the fervor of an enthusiast, a missionary, a devotee, who saw in that daily chronicle of the news an agency to stir men’s minds and spur their thoughts, if need be, to action; at the same time the mechanism and instrument of power, of achievement, of success. Fentriss Smith listened and was troubled in spirit by these unknown fires. He had supposed respectability to be the final aim and end of a sound newspaper tradition.
The apparent intimacy which had sprung up between twenty-five-dollar Smith and the reserved, almost hermit-like Banneker was the subject of curious and amused commentary in The Ledger office. Mallory hazarded a humorous guess that Banneker was tutoring Smith in the finer arts of journalism, which was not so far amiss as its proponent might have supposed.
The Great Heat broke several evenings later in a drench of rain and wind. This, being in itself important news, kept Banneker late at his writing, and he had told his host not to wait, that he would join him on the yacht sometime about midnight. So Smith had gone on alone.
The next morning Tommy Burt, lounging into the office from an early assignment, approached the City Desk with a twinkle far back in his lively eyes.
“Hear anything of a shoot-fest up in the Bad Lands last night?” he asked.
“Not yet,” replied Mr. Greenough. “They’re getting to be everyday occurrences up there. Is it on the police slips, Mr. Mallory?”
“No. Nothing in that line,” answered the assistant, looking over his assortment.
“Police are probably suppressing it,” opined Burt.
“Have you got the story?” queried Mr. Greenough.
“In outline. It isn’t really my story.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“That’s part of it.” Tommy Burt leaned against Mallory’s desk and appeared to be revolving some delectable thought in his mind.
“Tommy,” said Mallory, “they didn’t open that committee meeting you’ve been attending with a corkscrew, did they?”
“I’m intoxicated with the chaste beauties of my story, which isn’t mine,” returned the dreamily smiling Mr. Burt. “Here it is, boiled down. Guest on an anchored yacht returning late, sober, through the mist. Wharf-gang shooting craps in a pier-shed. They size him up and go to it; six of ’em. Knives and one gun: maybe more. The old game: one asks for the time. Another sneaks up behind and gives the victim the elbow-garrote. The rest rush him. Well, they got as far as the garrote. Everything lovely and easy. Then Mr. Victim introduces a few specialties. Picks a gun from somewhere around his shirt-front, shoots the garroter over his shoulder; kills the man in front, who is at him with a stiletto, ducks a couple of shots from the gang, and lays out two more of ’em. The rest take to the briny. Tally: two dead, one dying, one wounded, Mr. Guest walks to the shore end, meets two patrolmen, and turns in his gun. ‘I’ve done a job for you,’ says he. So they pinch him. He’s in the police station, incomunicado.”
Throughout the narrative, Mr. Greenough had thrown in little, purring interjections of “Good! Good!”—“Yes.”—“Ah! good!” At the conclusion Mallory exclaimed!
“Moses! That is a story! You say it isn’t yours? Why not?”
“Because it’s Banneker’s.”
“Why?”
“He’s the guest with the gun.”
Mallory jumped in his chair. “Banneker!” he exclaimed. “Oh, hell!” he added disconsolately.
“Takes the shine out of the story, doesn’t it?” observed Burt with a malicious smile.
One of the anomalous superstitions of newspaperdom is that nothing which happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be “big news.” The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight the story.
“What was Banneker doing down there?” queried Mr. Greenough.
“Visiting on a yacht.”
“Is that so?” There was a ray of hope in the other’s face. The glamour of yachting association might be made to cast a radiance about the event, in which the damnatory fact that the principal figure was a mere reporter could be thrown into low relief. Such is the view which journalistic snobbery takes of the general public’s snobbery. “Whose yacht?”
Again the spiteful little smile appealed on Burt’s lips as he dashed the rising hope. “Fentriss Smith’s.”
And again the expletive of disillusion burst from between Mallory’s teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to a carefully handled inside-page three-quarter of a column.
“You say that Mr. Banneker is in the police station?” asked the city editor.
“Or at headquarters. They’re probably working the third degree on him.”
“That won’t do,” declared the city desk incumbent, with conviction. He caught up the telephone, got the paper’s City Hall reporter, and was presently engaged in some polite but pointed suggestions to His Honor the Mayor. Shortly after, Police Headquarters called; the Chief himself was on the wire.
“The Ledger is behind Mr. Banneker, Chief,” said Mr. Greenough crisply. “Carrying concealed weapons? If your men in that precinct were fit to be on the force, there would be no need for private citizens to go armed. You get the point, I see. Good-bye.”
“Unless I am a bad guesser we’ll have Banneker back here by evening. And there’ll be no manhandling in his case,” Mallory said to Burt.
Counsel was taken of Mr. Gordon, as soon as that astute managing editor arrived, as to the handling of the difficult situation. The Ledger, always cynically intolerant of any effort to better the city government, as savoring of “goo-gooism,” which was its special bête noire, could not well make the shooting a basis for a general attack upon police laxity, though it was in this that lay the special news possibility of the event. On the other hand, the thing was far too sensational to be ignored or too much slurred.
Andreas, the assistant managing editor, in charge of the paper’s make-up, a true news-hound with an untainted delight in the unusual and striking, no matter what its setting might be, who had been called into the conference, advocated “smearing it all over the front page, with Banneker’s first-hand statement for the lead—pictures too.”
Him, Mr. Greenough, impassive joss of the city desk, regarded with a chill eye. “One reporter visiting another gets into a muss and shoots up some riverside toughs,” he remarked contemptuously. “You can hardly expect our public to get greatly excited over that. Are we going into the business of exploiting our own cubs?”
Thereupon there was sharp discussion to which Mr. Gordon put an end by remarking that the evening papers would doubtless give them a lead; meantime they could get Banneker’s version.
First to come in was The Evening New Yorker, the most vapid of all the local prints, catering chiefly to the uptown and shopping element. Its heading half-crossed the page proclaiming “Guest of Yachtsman Shoots Down Thugs.” Nowhere in the article did it appear that Banneker had any connection with the newspaper world. He was made to appear as a young Westerner on a visit to the yacht of a millionaire business man, having come on from his ranch in the desert, and presumptively—to add the touch of godhead—a millionaire himself.
“The stinking liars!” said Andreas.
“That settles it,” declared Mr. Gordon. “We’ll give the facts plainly and without sensationalism; but all the facts.”
“Including Mr. Banneker’s connection here?” inquired Mr. Greenough.
“Certainly.”
The other evening papers, more honest than The Evening New Yorker, admitted, though, as it were, regretfully and in an inconspicuous finale to their accounts that the central figure of the sensation was only a reporter. But the fact of his being guest on a yacht was magnified and glorified.
At five o’clock Banneker arrived, having been bailed out after some difficulty, for the police were frightened and ugly, foreseeing that this swift vengeance upon the notorious gang, meted out by a private hand, would throw a vivid light upon their own inefficiency and complaisance. Happily the District Attorney’s office was engaged in one of its periodical feuds with the Police Department over some matter of graft gone astray, and was more inclined to make a cat’s-paw than a victim out of Banneker.
Though inwardly strung to a high pitch, for the police officials had kept him sleepless through the night by their habitual inquisition, Banneker held himself well in hand as he went to the City Desk to report gravely that he had been unable to come earlier.
“So we understand, Mr. Banneker,” said Mr. Greenough, his placid features for once enlivened. “That was a good job you did. I congratulate you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Greenough,” returned Banneker. “I had to do it or get done. And, at that, it wasn’t much of a trick. They were a yellow lot.”
“Very likely: very likely. You’ve handled a gun before.”
“Only in practice.”
“Ever shot anybody before?”
“No, sir.”
“How does it feel?” inquired the city editor, turning his pale eyes on the other and fussing nervously with his fingers.
“At first you want to go on killing,” answered Banneker. “Then, when it’s over, there’s a big let-down. It doesn’t seem as if it were you.” He paused and added boyishly: “The evening papers are making an awful fuss over it.”
“What do you expect? It isn’t every day that a Wild West Show with real bullets and blood is staged in this effete town.”
“Of course I knew there’d be a kick-up about it,” admitted Banneker. “But, some way—well, in the West, if a gang gets shot up, there’s quite a bit of talk for a while, and the boys want to buy the drinks for the fellow that does it, but it doesn’t spread all over the front pages. I suppose I still have something of the Western view.... How much did you want of this, Mr. Greenough?” he concluded in a business-like tone.
“You are not doing the story, Mr. Banneker. Tommy Burt is.”
“I’m not writing it? Not any of it?”
“Certainly not. You’re the hero”—there was a hint of elongation of the first syllable which might have a sardonic connotation from those pale and placid lips—“not the historian. Burt will interview you.”
“A Patriot reporter has already. I gave him a statement.”
Mr. Greenough frowned. “It would have been as well to have waited. However.”
“Oh, Banneker,” put in Mallory, “Judge Enderby wants you to call at his office.”
“Who’s Judge Enderby?”
“Chief Googler of the Goo-Goos; the Law Enforcement Society lot. They call him the ablest honest lawyer in New York. He’s an old crab. Hates the newspapers, particularly us.”
“Why?”
“He cherishes some theory,” said Mr. Greenough in his most toneless voice, “that a newspaper ought to be conducted solely in the interests of people like himself.”
“Is there any reason why I should go chasing around to see him?”
“That’s as you choose. He doesn’t see reporters often. Perhaps it would be as well.”
“His outfit are after the police,” explained Mallory. “That’s what he wants you for. It’s part of their political game. Always politics.”
“Well, he can wait until to-morrow, I suppose,” remarked Banneker indifferently.
Greenough examined him with impenetrable gaze. This was a very cavalier attitude toward Judge Willis Enderby. For Enderby was a man of real power. He might easily have been the most munificently paid corporation attorney in the country but for the various kinds of business which he would not, in his own homely phrase, “poke at with a burnt stick.” Notwithstanding his prejudices, he was confidential legal adviser, in personal and family affairs, to a considerable percentage of the important men and women of New York. He was supposed to be the only man who could handle that bull-elephant of finance, ruler of Wall Street, and, when he chose to give it his contemptuous attention, dictator, through his son and daughters, of the club and social world of New York, old Poultney Masters, in the apoplectic rages into which the slightest thwart to his will plunged him. To Enderby’s adroitness the financier (one of whose pet vanities was a profound and wholly baseless faith in himself as a connoisseur of art) owed it that he had not become a laughing-stock through his purchase of a pair of particularly flagrant Murillos, planted for his special behoof by a gang of clever Italian swindlers. Rumor had it that when Enderby had privately summed up his client’s case for his client’s benefit before his client as referee, in these words: “And, Mr. Masters, if you act again in these matters without consulting me, you must find another lawyer; I cannot afford fools for clients”—they had to call in a physician and resort to the ancient expedient of bleeding, to save the great man’s cerebral arteries from bursting.
Toward the public press, Enderby’s attitude was the exact reverse of Horace Vanney’s. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of the Law Enforcement Society. The newspapers did not like Willis Enderby any more than he liked them. But they cherished for him an unrequited respect.
That a reporter, a nobody of yesterday whose association with The Ledger constituted his only claim to any status whatever, should profess indifference to a summons from a man of Enderby’s position, suggested affectation to Mr. Greenough’s suspicions. Young Mr. Banneker’s head was already swelling, was it? Very well; in the course of time and his duties, Mr. Greenough would apply suitable remedies.
If Banneker were, indeed, taking a good conceit of himself from the conspicuous position achieved so unexpectedly, the morning papers did nothing to allay it. Most of them slurred over, as lightly as possible, the fact of his journalistic connection; as in the evening editions, the yacht feature was kept to the fore. There were two exceptions. The Ledger itself, in a colorless and straightforward article, frankly identified the hero of the episode, in the introductory sentence, as a member of its city staff, and his host of the yacht as another journalist. But there was one notable omission about which Banneker determined to ask Tommy Burt as soon as he could see him. The Patriot, most sensational of the morning issues, splurged wildly under the caption, “Yacht Guest Cleans Out Gang Which Cowed Police.” The Sphere, in an editorial, demanded a sweeping and honest investigation of the conditions which made life unsafe in the greatest of cities. The Sphere was always demanding sweeping and honest investigations, and not infrequently getting them. In Greenough’s opinion this undesirable result was likely to be achieved now. To Mr. Gordon he said:
“We ought to shut down all we can on the Banneker follow-up. An investigation with our man as prosecuting witness would put us in the position of trying to reform the police, and would play into the hands of the Enderby crowd.”
The managing editor shook a wise and grizzled head. “If The Patriot keeps up its whooping and The Sphere its demanding, the administration will have to do something. After all, Mr. Greenough, things have become pretty unendurable in the Murder Precinct.”
“That’s true. But the signed statement of Banneker’s in The Patriot—it’s really an interview faked up as a statement—is a savage attack on the whole administration.”
“I understand,” remarked Mr. Gordon, “that they were going to beat him up scientifically in the station house when Smith came in and scared them out of it.”
“Yes. Banneker is pretty angry over it. You can’t blame him. But that’s no reason why we should alienate the city administration.... Then you think, Mr. Gordon, that we’ll have to keep the story running?”
“I think, Mr. Greenough, that we’ll have to give the news,” answered the managing editor austerely. “Where is Banneker now?”
“With Judge Enderby, I believe. In case of an investigation he won’t be much use to us until it’s over.”
“Can’t be helped,” returned Mr. Gordon serenely. “We’ll stand by our man.”
Banneker had gone to the old-fashioned offices of Enderby and Enderby, in a somewhat inimical frame of mind. Expectant of an invitation to aid the Law Enforcement Society in cleaning up a pest-hole of crime, he was half determined to have as little to do with it as possible. Overnight consideration had developed in him the theory that the function of a newspaper is informative, not reformative; that when a newspaper man has correctly adduced and frankly presented the facts, his social as well as his professional duty is done. Others might hew out the trail thus blazed; the reporter, bearing his searchlight, should pass on to other dark spots. All his theories evaporated as soon as he confronted Judge Enderby, forgotten in the interest inspired by the man.
A portrait painter once said of Willis Enderby that his face was that of a saint, illumined, not by inspiration, but by shrewdness. With his sensitiveness to beauty of whatever kind, Banneker felt the extraordinary quality of the face, beneath its grim outline, interpreting it from the still depth of the quiet eyes rather than from the stern mouth and rather tyrannous nose. He was prepared for an abrupt and cold manner, and was surprised when the lawyer rose to shake hands, giving him a greeting of courtly congratulation upon his courage and readiness. If the purpose of this was to get Banneker to expand, as he suspected, it failed. The visitor sensed the cold reserve behind the smile.
“Would you be good enough to run through this document?” requested the lawyer, motioning Banneker to a seat opposite himself, and handing him a brief synopsis of what the Law Enforcement Society hoped to prove regarding police laxity.
Exercising that double faculty of mind which later became a part of the Banneker legend in New York journalism, the reader, whilst absorbing the main and quite simple points of the report, recalled an instance in which an Atkinson and St. Philip ticket agent had been maneuvered into a posture facing a dazzling sunset, and had adjusted his vision to find it focused upon the barrel of a 45. Without suspecting the Judge of hold-up designs, he nevertheless developed a parallel. Leaving his chair he walked over and sat by the window. Halfway through the document, he quietly laid it aside and returned the lawyer’s studious regard.
“Have you finished?” asked Judge Enderby.
“No.”
“You do not find it interesting?”
“Less interesting than your idea in giving it to me.”
“What do you conceive that to have been?”
By way of reply, Banneker cited the case of Tim Lake, the robbed agent. “I think,” he added with a half smile, “that you and I will do better in the open.”
“I think so, too. Mr. Banneker, are you honest?”
“Where I came from, that would be regarded as a trouble-hunter’s question.”
“I ask you to regard it as important and take it without offense.”
“I don’t know about that,” returned Banneker gravely. “We’ll see. Honest, you say. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you begin by doubting the honesty of a stranger against whom you know nothing?”
“Legal habit, I dare say. Fortified, in this case, by your association with The Ledger.”
“You haven’t a high opinion of my paper?”
“The very highest, of its adroitness and expertness. It can make the better cause appear the worse with more skill than any other journal in America.”
“I thought that was the specialty of lawyers.”
Judge Enderby accepted the touch with a smile.
“A lawyer is an avowed special pleader. He represents one side. A newspaper is supposed to be without bias and to present the facts for the information of its one client, the public. You will readily appreciate the difference.”
“I do. Then you don’t consider The Ledger honest.”
Judge Enderby’s composed glance settled upon the morning’s issue, spread upon his desk. “I have, I assume, the same opinion of The Ledger’s honesty that you have.”
“Do you mind explaining that to me quite simply, so that I shall be sure to understand it?” invited Banneker.
“You have read the article about your exploit?”
“Yes.”
“Is that honest?”
“It is as accurate a job as I’ve ever known done.”
“Granted. Is it honest?”
“I don’t know,” answered the other after a pause. “I intend to find out.”
“You intend to find out why it is so reticent on every point that might impugn the police, I take it. I could tell you; but yours is the better way. You gave the same interview to your own paper that you gave to The Patriot, I assume. By the way, what a commentary on journalism that the most scurrilous sheet in New York should have given the fullest and frankest treatment to the subject; a paper written by the dregs of Park Row for the reading of race-track touts and ignorant servant girls!”
“Yes; I gave them the same interview. It may have been crowded out—”
“For lack of space,” supplied Enderby in a tone which the other heartily disliked. “Mr. Banneker, I thought that this was to be in the open.”
“I’m wrong,” confessed the other. “I’ll know by this evening why the police part was handled that way, and if it was policy—” He stopped, considering.
“Well?” prompted the other.
“I’ll go through to the finish with your committee.”
“You’re as good as pledged,” retorted the lawyer. “I shall expect to hear from you.”
As soon as he could find Tommy Burt, Banneker put to him the direct question. “What is the matter with the story as I gave it to you?”
Burt assumed an air of touching innocence. “The story had to be handled with great care,” he explained blandly.
“Come off, Tommy. Didn’t you write the police part?”
Tommy Burl’s eyes denoted the extreme of candor. “It was suggested to me that your views upon the police, while interesting and even important, might be misunderstood.”
“Is that so? And who made the suggestion?”
“An all-wise city desk.”
“Thank you. Tommy.”
“The Morning Ledger,” volunteered Tommy Burt, “has a high and well-merited reputation for its fidelity to the principles of truth and fairness and to the best interests of the reading public. It never gives the public any news to play with that it thinks the dear little thing ought not to have. Did you say anything? No? Well; you meant it. You’re wrong. The Ledger is the highest-class newspaper in New York. We are the Elect!”
In his first revulsion of anger, Banneker was for going to Mr. Greenough and having it out with him. If it meant his resignation, very good. He was ready to look his job in the eye and tell it to go to hell. Turning the matter over in his mind, however, he decided upon another course. So far as the sensational episode of which he was the central figure went, he would regard himself consistently as a private citizen with no responsibility whatsoever to The Ledger. Let the paper print or suppress what it chose; his attitude toward it would be identical with his attitude toward the other papers. Probably the office powers would heartily disapprove of his having any dealings with Enderby and his Law Enforcement Society. Let them! He telephoned a brief but final message to Enderby and Enderby. When, late that night, Mr. Gordon called him over and suggested that it was highly desirable to let the whole affair drop out of public notice as soon as the startling facts would permit, he replied that Judge Enderby had already arranged to push an investigation.
“Doubtless,” observed the managing editor. “It is his specialty. But without your evidence they can’t go far.”
“They can have my evidence.”
Mr. Gordon, who had been delicately balancing his letter-opener, now delivered a whack of such unthinking ferocity upon his fat knuckle as to produce a sharp pang. He gazed in surprise and reproach upon the aching thumb and something of those emotions informed the regard which he turned slowly upon Banneker.
Mr. Gordon’s frame of mind was unenviable. The Inside Room, moved by esoteric considerations, political and, more remotely, financial, had issued to him a managerial ukase; no police investigation if it could be avoided. Now, news was the guise in which Mr. Gordon sincerely worshiped Truth, the God. But Mammon, in the Inside Room, held the purse-strings Mr. Gordon had arrived at his honorable and well-paid position, not by wisdom alone, but also by compromise. Here was a situation where news must give way to the more essential interests of the paper.
“Mr. Banneker,” he said, “that investigation will take a great deal of your time; more, I fear, than the paper can afford to give you.”
“They will arrange to put me on the stand in the mornings.”
“Further, any connection between a Ledger man and the Enderby Committee is undesirable and injudicious.”
“I’m sorry,” answered Banneker simply. “I’ve said I’d go through with it.”
Mr. Gordon selected a fresh knuckle for his modified drumming. “Have you considered your duty to the paper, Mr. Banneker? If not, I advise you to do so.” The careful manner, more than the words, implied threat.
Banneker leaned forward as if for a confidential communication, as he lapsed into a gross Westernism:
“Mr. Gordon, I am paying for this round of drinks.”
Somehow the managing editor received the impression that this remark, delivered in just that tone of voice and in its own proper environment, was usually accompanied by a smooth motion of the hand toward the pistol holster.
Banneker, after asking whether there was anything more, and receiving a displeased shake of the head, went away.
“Now,” said he to the waiting Tommy Burt, “they’ll probably fire me.”
“Let ’em! You can get plenty of other jobs. But I don’t think they will. Old Gordon is really with you. It makes him sick to have to doctor news.”
Sleepless until almost morning, Banneker reviewed in smallest detail his decision and the situation to which it had led. He thought that he had taken the right course. He felt that Miss Camilla would approve. Judge Enderby’s personality, he recognized, had exerted some influence upon his decision. He had conceived for the lawyer an instinctive respect and liking. There was about him a power of attraction, not readily definable, but seeming mysteriously to assert some hidden claim from the past.
Where had he seen that fine and still face before?
CHAPTER IX
Sequels of a surprising and diverse character followed Banneker’s sudden fame. The first to manifest itself was disconcerting. On the Wednesday following the fight on the pier, Mrs. Brashear intercepted him in the hallway.
“I’m sure we all admire what you did, Mr. Banneker,” she began, in evident trepidation.
The subject of this eulogy murmured something deprecatory.
“It was very brave of you. Most praiseworthy. We appreciate it, all of us. Yes, indeed. It’s very painful, Mr. Banneker. I never expected to—to—indeed, I couldn’t have believed—” Mrs. Brashear’s plump little hands made gestures so fluttery and helpless that her lodger was moved to come to her aid.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Brashear? What’s troubling you?”
“If you could make it convenient,” said she tremulously, “when your month is up. I shouldn’t think of asking you before.”
“Are you giving me notice?” he inquired in amazement.
“If you don’t mind, please. The notoriety, the—the—your being arrested. You were arrested, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. But the coroner’s jury cleared—”
“Such a thing never happened to any of my guests before. To have my house in the police records,” wept Mrs. Brashear. “Really, Mr. Banneker, really! You can’t know how it hurts one’s pride.”
“I’ll go next week,” said the evicted one, divided between amusement and annoyance, and retired to escape another outburst of grief.
Now that the matter was presented to him, he was rather glad to be leaving. Quarters somewhere in mid-town, more in consonance with his augmented income, suggested themselves as highly desirable. Since the affray he had been the object of irksome attentions from his fellow lodgers. It is difficult to say whether he found the more unendurable young Wickert’s curiosity regarding details, Hainer’s pompous adulation, or Lambert’s admiring but jocular attitude. The others deemed it their duty never to refrain from some reference to the subject wherever and whenever they encountered him. The one exception was Miss Westlake. She congratulated him once, quietly but with warm sincerity; and when next she came to his door, dealt with another topic.
“Mrs. Brashear tells me that you are leaving, Mr. Banneker.”
“Did she tell you why? That she has fired me out?”
“No. She didn’t.”
Banneker, a little surprised and touched at the landlady’s reticence, explained.
“Ah, well,” commented Miss Westlake, “you would soon have outgrown us in any case.”
“I’m not so sure. Where one lives doesn’t so much matter. And I’m a creature of habit.”
“I think that you are going to be a very big man, Mr. Banneker.”
“Do you?” He smiled down at her. “Now, why?”
She did not answer his smile. “You’ve got power,” she replied. “And you have mastered your medium—or gone far toward it.”
“I’m grateful for your good opinion,” he began courteously; but she broke in on him, shaking her head.
“If it were mine alone, it wouldn’t matter. It’s the opinion of those who know. Mr. Banneker, I’ve been taking a liberty.”
“You’re the last person in the world to do that, I should think,” he replied smilingly.
“But I have. You may remember my asking you once when those little sketches that I retyped so often were to be published.”
“Yes. I never did anything with them.”
“I did. I showed them to Violet Thornborough. She is an old friend.”
Ignorant of the publication world outside of Park Row, Banneker did not recognize a name, unknown to the public, which in the inner literary world connoted all that was finest, most perceptive, most discriminating and helpful in selective criticism. Miss Thornborough had been the first to see and foster half of the glimmering and feeble radiances which had later grown to be the manifest lights of the magazine and book world, thanks largely to her aid and encouragement. The next name mentioned by Miss Westlake was well enough known to Banneker, however. The critic, it appears, had, with her own hands, borne the anonymous, typed copies to the editorial sanctum of the foremost of monthlies, and, claiming a prerogative, refused to move aside from the pathway of orderly business until the Great Gaines himself, editor and autocrat of the publication, had read at least one of them. So the Great Gaines indulged Miss Thornborough by reading one. He then indulged himself by reading three more.
“Your goose,” he pronounced, “is not fledged; but there may be a fringe of swan feathers. Bring him to see me.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea of who, what, or where he is,” answered the insistent critic.
“Then hire a detective at our expense,” smiled the editor. “And, please, as you go, can’t you lure away with you Mr. Harvey Wheelwright, our most popular novelist, now in the reception-room wishing us to publish his latest enormity? Us!” concluded the Great Gaines sufficiently.
Having related the episode to its subject, Miss Westlake said diffidently: “Do you think it was inexcusably impertinent of me?”
“No. I think it was very kind.”
“Then you’ll go to see Mr. Gaines?”
“One of these days. When I get out of this present scrape. And I hope you’ll keep on copying my Sunday stuff after I leave. Nobody else would be so patient with my dreadful handwriting.”
She gave him a glance and a little flush of thankfulness. Matters had begun to improve with Miss Westlake. But it was due to Banneker that she had won through her time of desperation. Now, through his suggestion, she was writing successfully, quarter and half column “general interest” articles for the Woman’s Page of the Sunday Ledger. If she could in turn help Banneker to recognition, part of her debt would be paid. As for him, he was interested in, but not greatly expectant of, the Gaines invitation. Still, if he were cast adrift from The Ledger because of activity in the coming police inquiry, there was a possible port in the magazine world.
Meantime there pressed the question of a home. Cressey ought to afford help on that. He called the gilded youth on the telephone.
“Hello, old fire-eater!” cried Cressey. “Some little hero, aren’t you! Bully work, my boy. I’m proud to know you.... What; quarters? Easiest thing you know. I’ve got the very thing—just like a real-estate agent. Let’s see; this is your Monday at Sherry’s, isn’t it? All right. I’ll meet you there.”
Providentially, as it might appear, a friend of Cressey’s, having secured a diplomatic appointment, was giving up his bachelor apartment in the select and central Regalton.
“Cheap as dirt,” said the enthusiastic Cressey, beaming at Banneker over his cocktail that evening. “Two rooms and bath; fully furnished, and you can get it for eighteen hundred a year.”
“Quite a raise from the five dollars a week I’ve been paying,” smiled Banneker.
“Pshaw! You’ve got to live up to your new reputation. You’re somebody, now, Banneker. All New York is talking about you. Why, I’m afraid to say I know you for fear they’ll think I’m bragging.”
“All of which doesn’t increase my income,” pointed out the other.
“It will. Just wait. One way or another you’ll capitalize that reputation. That’s the way New York is.”
“That isn’t the way I am, however. I’ll capitalize my brains and ability, if I’ve got ’em; not my gun-play.”
“Your gun-play will advertise your brains and ability, then,” retorted Cressey. “Nobody expects you to make a princely income shooting up toughs on the water-front. But your having done it will put you in the lime-light where people will notice you. And being noticed is the beginning of success in this-man’s-town. I’m not sure it isn’t the end, too. Just see how the head waiter fell all over himself when you came in. I expect he’s telling that bunch at the long table yonder who you are now.”
“Let him,” returned Banneker comfortably, his long-bred habit of un-self-consciousness standing him in good stead. “They’ll all forget it soon enough.”
As he glanced over at the group around the table, the man who was apparently acting as host caught his eye and nodded in friendly fashion.
“Oh, you know Marrineal, do you?” asked Cressey in surprise.
“I’ve seen him, but I’ve never spoken to him. He dines sometimes in a queer little restaurant way downtown, just off the Swamp. Who is he, anyway?”
“Puzzle. Nobody in the clubs knows him. He’s a spender. Bit of a rounder, too, I expect. Plays the Street, and beats it, too.”
“Who’s the little beauty next him?”
“You a rising light of Park Row, and not know Betty Raleigh? She killed em dead in London in romantic comedy and now she’s come back here to repeat.”
“Oh, yes. Opening to-night, isn’t she? I’ve got a seat.” He looked over at Marrineal, who was apparently protesting against his neighbor’s reversed wine-glass. “So that’s Mr. Marrineal’s little style of game, is it?” He spoke crudely, for the apparition of the girl was quite touching in its youth, and delight, and candor of expression, whereas he had read into Marrineal’s long, handsome, and blandly mature face a touch of the satyr. He resented the association.
“No; it isn’t,” replied Cressey promptly. “If it is, he’s in the wrong pew. Miss Raleigh is straight as they make ’em, from all I hear.”
“She looks it,” admitted Banneker.
“At that, she’s in a rather sporty lot. Do you know that chap three seats to her left?”
Banneker considered the diner, a round-faced, high-colored, youthful man of perhaps thirty-five, with a roving and merry eye. “No,” he answered. “I never saw him before.”
“That’s Del Eyre,” remarked Cressey casually, and appearing not to look at Banneker.
“A friend of yours?” The indifference of the tone indicated to his companion either that Banneker did not identify Delavan Eyre by his marriage, or that he maintained extraordinary control over himself, or that the queer, romantic stories of Io Welland’s “passion in the desert” were gross exaggerations. Cressey inclined to the latter belief.
“Not specially,” he answered the question. “He belongs to a couple of my clubs. Everybody likes Del; even Mrs. Del. But his pace is too swift for me. Just at present he is furnishing transportation, sixty horse-power, for Tarantina, the dancer who is featured in Betty Raleigh’s show.”
“Is she over there with them?”
“Oh, no. She wouldn’t be. It isn’t as sporty as all that.” He rose to shake hands with a short, angular young man, dressed to a perfection as accurate as Banneker’s own, and excelling him in one distinctive touch, a coat-flower of gold-and-white such as no other in New York could wear, since only in one conservatory was that special orchid successfully grown. By it Banneker recognized Poultney Masters, Jr., the son and heir of the tyrannous old financier who had for years bullied and browbeaten New York to his wayward old heart’s content. In his son there was nothing of the bully, but through the amiability of manner Banneker could feel a quiet force. Cressey introduced them.
“We’re just having coffee,” said Banneker. “Will you join us?”
“Thank you; I must go back to my party. I came over to express my personal obligation to you for cleaning out that gang of wharf-rats. My boat anchors off there. I hope to see you aboard her sometime.”
“You owe me no thanks,” returned Banneker good-humoredly. “What I did was to save my own precious skin.”
“The effect was the same. After this the rats will suspect every man of being a Banneker in disguise, and we shall have no more trouble.”
“You see!” remarked Cressey triumphantly as Masters went away. “I told you you’d arrived.”
“Do you count a word of ordinary courtesy as so much?” inquired Banneker, surprised and amused.
“From Junior? I certainly do. No Masters ever does anything without having figured out its exact meaning in advance.”
“And what does this mean?” asked the other, still unimpressed.
“For one thing, that the Masters influence will be back of you, if the police try to put anything over. For another, that you’ve got the broadest door to society open to you, if Junior follows up his hint about the yacht.”
“I haven’t the time,” returned Banneker with honest indifference. He sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “Cressey,” he said, “if I had a newspaper of my own in New York, do you know what I’d do with it?”
“Make money.”
“I hope so. But whether I did or not, I’d set out to puncture that bubble of the Masters power and supremacy. It isn’t right for any man to have that power just through money. It isn’t American.”
“The old man would smash your paper in six months.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody has ever taken a shot at him yet. He may be more vulnerable than he looks.... Speaking of money, I suppose I’d better take that apartment. God knows how I’ll pay for it, especially if I lose my job.”
“If you lose your job I’ll get you a better one on Wall Street to-morrow.”
“On the strength of Poultney Masters, Jr., shaking hands with me, I suppose.”
“Practically. It may not get into your newspapers, but the Street will know all about it to-morrow.”
“It’s a queer city. And it’s a queer way to get on in it, by being quick on the trigger. Well, I’m off for the theater.”
Between acts, Banneker, walking out to get air, was conscious of being the object of comment and demonstration. He heard his name spoken in half whispers; saw nods and jerks of the head; was an involuntary eavesdropper upon a heated discussion; “That’s the man.”—“No; it ain’t. The paper says he’s a big feller.”—“This guy ain’t a reporter. Pipe his clothes.”—“Well, he’s big if you size him right. Look at his shoulders.”—“I’ll betcha ten he ain’t the man.” And an apologetic young fellow ran after him to ask if he was not, in truth, Mr. Banneker of The Ledger. Being no more than human, he experienced a feeling of mild excitation over all this. But no sooner had the curtain risen on the second act than he quite forgot himself and his notoriety in the fresh charm of the comedy, and the delicious simplicity of Betty Raleigh as the heroine. That the piece was destined to success was plain, even so early. As the curtain fell again, and the star appeared, dragging after her a long, gaunt, exhausted, alarmed man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who had been lurking in a corner suffering from incipient nervous breakdown and illusions of catastrophe, he being the author, the body of the house rose and shouted. A hand fell on Banneker’s shoulder.
“Come behind at the finish?” said a voice.
Turning, Banneker met the cynical and near-sighted eyes of Gurney, The Ledger’s dramatic critic, with whom he had merely a nodding acquaintance, as Gurney seldom visited the office except at off-hours.
“Yes; I’d like to,” he answered.
“Little Betty spotted you and has been demanding that the management bring you back for inspection.”
“The play is a big success, isn’t it?”
“I give it a year’s run,” returned the critic authoritatively. “Laurence has written it to fit Raleigh like a glove. She’s all they said of her in London. And when she left here a year ago, she was just a fairly good ingénue. However, she’s got brains, which is the next best thing in the theatrical game to marriage with the manager—or near-marriage.”
Banneker, considering Gurney’s crow-footed and tired leer, decided that he did not like the critic much.
Back-of-curtain after a successful opening provides a hectic and scrambled scene to the unaccustomed eye. Hastily presented to a few people, Banneker drifted to one side and, seating himself on a wire chair, contentedly assumed the role of onlooker. The air was full of laughter and greetings and kisses; light-hearted, offhand, gratulatory kisses which appeared to be the natural currency of felicitation. Betty Raleigh, lovely, flushed, and athrill with nervous exaltation, flung him a smile as she passed, one hand hooked in the arm of her leading man.
“You’re coming to supper with us later,” she called.
“Am I?” said Banneker.
“Of course. I’ve got something to ask you.” She spoke as one expectant of unquestioning obedience: this was her night of glory and power.
Whether he had been previously bidden in through Gurney, or whether this chance word constituted his invitation, he did not know. Seeking enlightenment upon the point, he discovered that the critic had disappeared, to furnish his half-column for the morning issue. La Tarantina, hearing his inquiry, gave him the news in her broken English. The dancer, lithe, powerful, with the hideous feet and knotty legs typical of her profession, turned her somber, questioning eyes on the stranger:
“You air Monsieur Ban-kerr, who shoot, n’est-ce-pas?” she inquired.
“My name is Banneker,” he replied.
“Weel you be ver’ good an’ shoot sahmbody for me?”
“With pleasure,” he said, laughing; “if you’ll plead for me with the jury.”
“Zen here he iss.” She stretched a long and, as it seemed, blatantly naked arm into a group near by and drew forth the roundish man whom Cressey had pointed out at Marrineal’s dinner party. “He would be unfaithful to me, ziss one.”
“I? Never!” denied the accused. He set a kiss in the hollow of the dancer’s wrist. “How d’ye do, Mr. Banneker,” he added, holding out his hand. “My name is Eyre.”
“But yess!” cried the dancer. “He—what you say it?—he r-r-r-rave over Miss R-r-raleigh. He make me jealous. He shall be shoot at sunrice an’ I weel console me wiz his shooter.”
“Charming programme!” commented the doomed man. It struck Banneker that he had probably been drinking a good deal, also that he was a very likeable person, indeed. “If you don’t mind my asking, where the devil did you learn to shoot like that?”
“Oh, out West where I came from. I used to practice on the pine trees at a little water-tank station called Manzanita”.
“Manzanita!” repeated the other. “By God!” He swore softly, and stared at the other.
Banneker was annoyed. Evidently the gossip of which Io’s girl friend had hinted that other night at Sherry’s had obtained wide currency. Before the conversation could go any further, even had it been likely to after that surprising check, one of the actors came over. He played the part of an ex-cowboy, who, in the bar-room scene, shot his way out of danger through a circle of gang-men, and he was now seeking from Banneker ostensibly pointers, actually praise.
“Say, old man,” he began without introduction. “Gimme a tip or two. How do you get your hand over for your gun without giving yourself away?”
“Just dive for it, as you do in the play. You do it plenty quick enough. You’d get the drop on me ten times out of ten,” returned Banneker pleasantly, leaving the gratified actor with the conviction that he had been talking with the coming dramatic critic of the age.
For upwards of an hour there was carnival on the dismantling stage, mingled with the hurried toil of scene-shifters and the clean-up gang. Then the impromptu party began to disperse, Eyre going away with the dancer, after coming to bid Banneker good-night, with a look of veiled curiosity and interest which its object could not interpret. Banneker was gathered into the corps intime of Miss Raleigh’s supper party, including the author of the play, an elderly first-nighter, two or three dramatic critics, Marrineal, who had drifted in, late, and half a dozen of the company. The men outnumbered the women, as is usual in such affairs, and Banneker found himself seated between the playwright and a handsome, silent girl who played with distinction the part of an elderly woman. There was wine in profusion, but he noticed that the player-folk drank sparingly. Condition, he correctly surmised, was part of their stock in trade. As it should be part of his also.
Late in the supper’s course, there was a shifting of seats, and he was landed next to the star.
“I suppose you’re bored stiff with talking about the shooting,” she said, at once.
“I am, rather. Wouldn’t you be?”
“I? Publicity is the breath of life to us,” she laughed. “You deal in it, so you don’t care for it.”
“That’s rather shrewd in you. I’m not sure that the logic is sound.”
“Anyway, I’m not going to bore you with your fame. But I want you to do something for me.”
“It is done,” he said solemnly.
“How prettily you pay compliments! There is to be a police investigation, isn’t there?”
“Probably.”
“Could you get me in?”
“Yes, indeed!”
“Then I want to come when you’re on the stand.”
“Great goodness! Why?”
“Why, if you want a reason,” she answered mischievously, “say that I want to bring good luck to your première, as you brought it to mine.”
“I’ll probably make a sorry showing. Perhaps you would give me some training.”
She answered in kind, and the acquaintanceship was progressing most favorably when a messenger of the theater manager’s office staff appeared with early editions of the morning papers. Instantly every other interest was submerged.
“Give me The Ledger,” demanded Betty. “I want to see what Gurney says.”
“Something pleasant surely,” said Banneker. “He told me that the play was an assured success.”
As she read, Betty’s vivacious face sparkled. Presently her expression changed. She uttered a little cry of disgust and rage.
“What’s the matter?” inquired the author.
“Gurney is up to his smartnesses again,” she replied. “Listen. Isn’t this enraging!” She read:
“As for the play itself, it is formed, fashioned, and finished in the cleverest style of tailor-made, to Miss Raleigh’s charming personality. One must hail Mr. Laurence as chief of our sartorial playwrights. No actress ever boasted a neater fit. Can you not picture him, all nice little enthusiasms and dainty devices, bustling about his fair patroness, tape in hand, mouth bristling with pins, smoothing out a wrinkle here, adjusting a line there, achieving his little chef d’oeuvre of perfect tailoring? We have had playwrights who were blacksmiths, playwrights who were costumers, playwrights who were musical-boxes, playwrights who were, if I may be pardoned, garbage incinerators. It remained, for Mr. Laurence to show us what can be done with scissors, needle, and a nice taste in frills.
“I think it’s mean and shameful!” proclaimed the reader in generous rage.
“But he gives you a splendid send-off, Miss Raleigh,” said her leading man, who, reading over her shoulder, had discovered that he, too, was handsomely treated.
“I don’t care if he does!” cried Betty. “He’s a pig!”
Her manager, possessed of a second copy of The Ledger, now made a weighty contribution to the discussion. “Just the same, this’ll help sell out the house. It’s full of stuff we can lift to paper the town with.”
He indicated several lines heartily praising Miss Raleigh and the cast, and one which, wrenched from its satirical context, was made to give an equally favorable opinion of the play. Something of Banneker’s astonishment at this cavalier procedure must have been reflected in his face, for Marrineal, opposite, turned to him with a look of amusement.
“What’s your view of that, Mr. Banneker?”
“Mine?” said Banneker promptly. “I think it’s crooked. What’s yours?”
“Still quick on the trigger,” murmured the other, but did not answer the return query.
Replies in profusion came from the rest, however. “It isn’t any crookeder than the review.”—“D’you call that fair criticism!”—“Gurney! He hasn’t an honest hair in his head.”—“Every other critic is strong for it; this is the only knock.”—“What did Laurence ever do to Gurney?”
Out of the welter of angry voices came Betty Raleigh’s clear speech, addressed to Banneker.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Banneker; I’d forgotten that The Ledger is your paper.”
“Oh, The Ledger ain’t any worse than the rest of ’em, take it day in and day out,” the manager remarked, busily penciling apposite texts for advertising, on the margin of Gurney’s critique.
“It isn’t fair,” continued the star. “A man spends a year working over a play—it was more than a year on this, wasn’t it, Denny?” she broke off to ask the author.
Laurence nodded. He looked tired and a little bored, Banneker thought.
“And a critic has a happy thought and five minutes to think it over, and writes something mean and cruel and facetious, and perhaps undoes a whole year’s work. Is that right?”