CHAPTER XV
Looking out of the front window, into the decorum of Grove Street, Mrs. Brashear could hardly credit the testimony of her glorified eyes. Could the occupant of the taxi indeed be Mr. Banneker whom, a few months before and most sorrowfully, she had sacrificed to the stern respectability of the house? And was it possible, as the very elegant trunk inscribed “E.B.—New York City” indicated, that he was coming back as a lodger? For the first time in her long and correct professional career, the landlady felt an unqualified bitterness in the fact that all her rooms were occupied.
The occupant of the taxi jumped out and ran lightly up the steps.
“How d’you do, Mrs. Brashear. Am I still excommunicated?”
“Oh, Mr. Banneker! I’m so glad to see you. If I could tell you how often I’ve blamed myself—”
“Let’s forget all that. The point is I’ve come back.”
“Oh, dear! I do hate not to take you in. But there isn’t a spot.”
“Who’s got my old room?”
“Mr. Hainer.”
“Hainer? Let’s turn him out.”
“I would in a minute,” declared the ungrateful landlady to whom Mr. Hainer had always been a model lodger. “But the law—”
“Oh, I’ll fix Hainer if you’ll fix the room.”
“How?” asked the bewildered Mrs. Brashear.
“The room? Just as it used to be. Bed, table, couple of chairs, bookshelf.”
“But Mr. Hainer’s things?”
“Store ’em. It’ll be for only a month.”
Leaving his trunk, Banneker sallied forth in smiling confidence to accost and transfer the unsuspecting occupant of his room. To achieve this, it was necessary only to convince the object of the scheme that the incredible offer was made in good faith; an apartment in the “swell” Regalton, luxuriously furnished, service and breakfast included, rent free for a whole month. A fairy-tale for the prosaic Hainer to be gloated over for the rest of his life! Very quietly, for this was part of the bargain, the middle-aged accountant moved to his new glories and Banneker took his old quarters. It was all accomplished that evening. The refurnishing was finished on the following day.
“But what are you doing it for, if I may be so bold, Mr. Banneker?” asked the landlady.
“Peace, quiet, and work,” he answered gayly. “Just to be where nobody can find me, while I do a job.”
Here, as in the old, jobless days, Banneker settled down to concentrated and happy toil. Always a creature of Spartan self-discipline in the matter of work, he took on, in this quiet and remote environment, new energies. Miss Westlake, recipient of the output as it came from the hard-driven pen, was secretly disquieted. Could any human being maintain such a pace without collapse? Day after day, the devotee of the third-floor-front rose at seven, breakfasted from a thermos bottle and a tin box, and set upon his writing; lunched hastily around the corner, returned with armfuls of newspapers which he skimmed as a preliminary to a second long bout with his pen; allowed himself an hour for dinner, and came back to resume the never-ending task. As in the days of the “Eban” sketches, now on the press for book publication, it was write, rewrite, and re-rewrite, the typed sheets coming back to Miss Westlake amended, interlined, corrected, but always successively shortened and simplified. Profitable, indeed, for the solicitous little typist; but she ventured, after a fortnight of it, to remonstrate on the score of ordinary prudence. Banneker laughed, though he was touched, too, by her interest.
“I’m indestructible,” he assured her. “But next week I shall run around outside a little.”
“You must,” she insisted.
“Field-work, I believe they call it. The Elysian Fields of Manhattan Island. Perhaps you’ll come with me sometimes and see that I attend properly to my recreation.”
Curiosity as well as a mere personal interest prompted her to accept. She did not understand the purpose of these strange and vivid writings committed to her hands, so different from any of the earlier of Mr. Banneker’s productions; so different, indeed, from anything that she had hitherto seen in any print. Nor did she derive full enlightenment from her Elysian journeys with the writer. They seemed to be casual if not aimless. The pair traveled about on street-cars, L trains, Fifth Avenue buses, dined in queer, crowded restaurants, drank in foreign-appearing beer-halls, went to meetings, to Cooper Union forums, to the Art Gallery, the Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, to dances in East-Side halls: and everywhere, by virtue of his easy and graceful good-fellowship, Banneker picked up acquaintances, entered into their discussions, listened to their opinions and solemn dicta, agreeing or controverting with equal good-humor, and all, one might have carelessly supposed, in the idlest spirit of a light-minded Haroun al Raschid.
“What is it all about, if you don’t mind telling?” asked his companion as he bade her good-night early one morning.
“To find what people naturally talk about,” was the ready answer.
“And then?”
“To talk with them about what interests them. In print.”
“Then it isn’t Elysian-fielding at all.”
“No. It’s work. Hard work.”
“And what do you do after it?”
“Oh, sit up and write for a while.”
“You’ll break down.”
“Oh, no! It’s good for me.”
And, indeed, it was better for him than the alternative of trying to sleep without the anodyne of complete exhaustion. For again, his hours were haunted by the not-to-be-laid spirit of Io Welland. As in those earlier days when, with hot eyes and set teeth, he had sent up his nightly prayer for deliverance from the powers of the past—
“Heaven shield and keep us free From the wizard, Memory And his cruel necromancies!”—
she came back to her old sway over his soul, and would not be exorcised.—So he drugged his brain against her with the opiate of weariness.
Three of his four weeks had passed when Banneker began to whistle at his daily stent. Thereafter small boys, grimy with printer’s ink, called occasionally, received instructions and departed, and there emanated from his room the clean and bitter smell of paste, and the clip of shears. Despite all these new activities, the supply of manuscript for Miss Westlake’s typewriter never failed. One afternoon Banneker knocked at the door, asked her if she thought she could take dictation direct, and on her replying doubtfully that she could try, transferred her and her machine to his den, which was littered with newspapers, proof-sheets, and foolscap. Walking to and fro with a sheet of the latter inscribed with a few notes in his hand, the hermit proceeded to deliver himself to the briskly clicking writing machine.
“Three-em dash,” said he at the close. “That seemed to go fairly well.”
“Are you training me?” asked Miss Westlake.
“No. I’m training myself. It’s easier to write, but it’s quicker to talk. Some day I’m going to be really busy”—Miss Westlake gasped—“and time-saving will be important. Shall we try it again to-morrow?”
She nodded. “I could brush up my shorthand and take it quicker.”
“Do you know shorthand?” He looked at her contemplatively. “Would you care to take a regular position, paying rather better than this casual work?”
“With you?” asked Miss Westlake in a tone which constituted a sufficient acceptance.
“Yes. Always supposing that I land one myself. I’m in a big gamble, and these,” he swept a hand over the littered accumulations, “are my cards. If they’re good enough, I’ll win.”
“They are good enough,” said Miss Westlake with simple faith.
“I’ll know to-morrow,” replied Banneker.
For a young man, jobless, highly unsettled of prospects, the ratio of whose debts to his assets was inversely to what it should have been, Banneker presented a singularly care-free aspect when, at 11 A.M. of a rainy morning, he called at Mr. Tertius Marrineal’s Fifth Avenue house, bringing with him a suitcase heavily packed. Mr. Marrineal’s personal Jap took over the burden and conducted it and its owner to a small rear room at the top of the house. Banneker apprehended at the first glance that this was a room for work. Mr. Marrineal, rising from behind a broad, glass-topped table with his accustomed amiable smile, also looked workmanlike.
“You have decided to come with us, I hope,” said he pleasantly enough, yet with a casual politeness which might have been meant to suggest a measure of indifference. Banneker at once caught the note of bargaining.
“If you think my ideas are worth my price,” he replied.
“Let’s have the ideas.”
“No trouble to show goods,” Banneker said, unclasping the suitcase. He preferred to keep the talk in light tone until his time came. From the case he extracted two close-packed piles of news-print, folded in half.
“Coals to Newcastle,” smiled Marrineal. “These seem to be copies of The Patriot.”
“Not exact copies. Try this one.” Selecting an issue at random he passed it to the other.
Marrineal went into it carefully, turning from the front page to the inside, and again farther in the interior, without comment. Nor did he speak at once when he came to the editorial page. But he glanced up at Banneker before settling down to read.
“Very interesting,” he said presently, in a non-committal manner. “Have you more?”
Silently Banneker transferred to the table-top the remainder of the suitcase’s contents. Choosing half a dozen at random, Marrineal turned each inside out and studied the editorial columns. His expression did not in any degree alter.
“You have had these editorials set up in type to suit yourself, I take it,” he observed after twenty minutes of perusal; “and have pasted them into the paper.”
“Exactly.”
“Why the double-column measure?”
“More attractive to the eye. It stands out.”
“And the heavy type for the same reason?”
“Yes. I want to make ’em just as easy to read as possible.”
“They’re easy to read,” admitted the other. “Are they all yours?”
“Mine—and others’.”
Marrineal looked a bland question. Banneker answered it.
“I’ve been up and down in the highways and the low-ways, Mr. Marrineal, taking those editorials from the speech of the ordinary folk who talk about their troubles and their pleasures.”
“I see. Straight from the throbbing heart of the people. Jones-in-the-street-car.”
“And Mrs. Jones. Don’t forget her. She’ll read ’em.”
“If she doesn’t, it won’t be because they don’t bid for her interest. Here’s this one, ‘Better Cooking Means Better Husbands: Try It.’ That’s the argumentum ad feminam with a vengeance.”
“Yes. I picked that up from a fat old party who was advising a thin young wife at a fish-stall. ‘Give’m his food right an’ he’ll come home to it, ‘stid o’ workin’ the free lunch.’”
“Here are two on the drink question. ‘Next Time Ask the Barkeep Why He Doesn’t Drink,’ and, ‘Mighty Elephants Like Rum—and Are Chained Slaves.’”
“You’ll find more moralizing on booze if you look farther. It’s one of the subjects they talk most about.”
“‘The Sardine is Dead: Therefore More Comfortable Than You, Mr. Straphanger,’” read Marrineal.
“Go up in the rush-hour L any day and you’ll hear that editorial with trimmings.”
“And ‘Mr. Flynn Owes You a Yacht Ride’ is of the same order, I suppose.”
“Yes. If it had been practicable, I’d have had some insets with that: a picture of Flynn, a cut of his new million-dollar yacht, and a table showing the twenty per cent dividends that the City Illuminating Company pays by over-taxing Jones on his lighting and heating. That would almost tell the story without comment.”
“I see. Still making it easy for them to read.”
Marrineal ran over a number of other captions, sensational, personal, invocative, and always provocative: “Man, Why Hasn’t Your Wife Divorced You?” “John L. Sullivan, the Great Unknown.” “Why Has the Ornithorhyncus Got a Beak?” “If You Must Sell Your Vote, Ask a Fair Price For It.” “Mustn’t Play, You Kiddies: It’s a Crime: Ask Judge Croban.” “Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, Christ; All Dead, But—!!!” “The Inventor of Goose-Plucking Was the First Politician. They’re At It Yet.” “How Much Would You Pay a Man to Think For You?” “Air Doesn’t Cost Much: Have You Got Enough to Breathe?”
“All this,” said the owner of The Patriot, “is taken from what people talk and think about?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t some of it reach out into the realm of what Mr. Banneker thinks they ought to talk and think about?”
Banneker laughed. “Discovered! Oh, I won’t pretend but what I propose to teach ’em thinking.”
“If you can do that and make them think our way—”
“‘Give me place for my fulcrum,’ said Archimedes.”
“But that’s an editorial you won’t write very soon. One more detail. You’ve thrown up words and phrases into capital letters all through for emphasis. I doubt whether that will do.”
“Why not?”
“Haven’t you shattered enough traditions without that? The public doesn’t want to be taught with a pointer. I’m afraid that’s rather too much of an innovation.”
“No innovation at all. In fact, it’s adapted plagiarism.”
“From what?”
“Harper’s Monthly of the seventy’s. I used to have some odd volumes in my little library. There was a department of funny anecdote; and the point of every joke, lest some obtuse reader should overlook it, was printed in italics. That,” chuckled Banneker, “was in the days when we used to twit the English with lacking a sense of humor. However, the method has its advantages. It’s fool-proof. Therefore I helped myself to it.”
“Then you’re aiming at the weak-minded?”
“At anybody who can assimilate simple ideas plainly expressed,” declared the other positively. “There ought to be four million of ’em within reaching distance of The Patriot’s presses.”
“Your proposition—though you haven’t made any as yet—is that we lead our editorial page daily with matter such as this. Am I correct?”
“No. Make a clean sweep of the present editorials. Substitute mine. One a day will be quite enough for their minds to work on.”
“But that won’t fill the page,” objected the proprietor.
“Cartoon. Column of light comment. Letters from readers. That will,” returned Banneker with severe brevity.
“It might be worth trying,” mused Marrineal.
“It might be worth, to a moribund paper, almost anything.” The tone was significant.
“Then you are prepared to join our staff?”
“On suitable terms.”
“I had thought of offering you,” Marrineal paused for better effect, “one hundred and fifty dollars a week.”
Banneker was annoyed. That was no more than he could earn, with a little outside work, on The Ledger. He had thought of asking two hundred and fifty. Now he said promptly:
“Those editorials are worth three hundred a week to any paper. As a starter,” he added.
A pained and patient smile overspread Marrineal’s regular features. “The Patriot’s leader-writer draws a hundred at present.”
“I dare say.”
“The whole page costs barely three hundred.”
“It is overpaid.”
“For a comparative novice,” observed Marrineal without rancor, “you do not lack self-confidence.”
“There are the goods,” said Banneker evenly. “It is for you to decide whether they are worth the price asked.”
“And there’s where the trouble is,” confessed Marrineal. “I don’t know. They might be.”
Banneker made his proposition. “You spoke of my being a novice. I admit the weak spot. I want more experience. You can afford to try this out for six months. In fact, you can’t afford not to. Something has got to be done with The Patriot, and soon. It’s losing ground daily.”
“You are mistaken,” returned Marrineal.
“Then the news-stands and circulation lists are mistaken, too,” retorted the other. “Would you care to see my figures?”
Marrineal waved away the suggestion with an easy gesture which surrendered the point.
“Very well. I’m backing the new editorial idea to get circulation.”
“With my money,” pointed out Marrineal.
“I can’t save you the money. But I can spread it for you, that three hundred dollars.”
“How, spread it?”
“Charge half to editorial page: half to the news department.”
“On account of what services to the news department?”
“General. That is where I expect to get my finishing experience. I’ve had enough reporting. Now I’m after the special work; a little politics, a little dramatic criticism; a touch of sports; perhaps some book-reviewing and financial writing. And, of course, an apprenticeship in the Washington office.”
“Haven’t you forgotten the London correspondence?”
Whether or not this was sardonic, Banneker did not trouble to determine. “Too far away, and not time enough,” he answered. “Later, perhaps, I can try that.”
“And while you are doing all these things who is to carry out the editorial idea?”
“I am.”
Marrineal stared. “Both? At the same time?”
“Yes.”
“No living man could do it.”
“I can do it. I’ve proved it to myself.”
“How and where?”
“Since I last saw you. Now that I’ve got the hang of it, I can do an editorial in the morning, another in the afternoon, a third in the evening. Two and a half days a week will turn the trick. That leaves the rest of the time for the other special jobs.”
“You won’t live out the six months.”
“Insure my life if you like,” laughed Banneker. “Work will never kill me.”
Marrineal, sitting with inscrutable face turned half away from his visitor, was beginning, “If I meet you on the salary,” when Banneker broke in:
“Wait until you hear the rest. I’m asking that for six months only. Thereafter I propose to drop the non-editorial work and with it the salary.”
“With what substitute?”
“A salary based upon one cent a week for every unit of circulation put on from the time the editorials begin publication.”
“It sounds innocent,” remarked Marrineal. “It isn’t as innocent as it sounds,” he added after a penciled reckoning on the back of an envelope. “In case we increase fifty thousand, you will be drawing twenty-five thousand a year.”
“Well? Won’t it be worth the money?”
“I suppose it would,” admitted Marrineal dubiously. “Of course fifty thousand in six months is an extreme assumption. Suppose the circulation stands still?”
“Then I starve. It’s a gamble. But it strikes me that I’m giving the odds.”
“Can you amuse yourself for an hour?” asked Marrineal abruptly.
“Why, yes,” answered Banneker hesitantly. “Perhaps you’d turn me loose in your library. I’d find something to put in the time on there.”
“Not very much, I’m afraid,” replied his host apologetically. “I’m of the low-brow species in my reading tastes, or else rather severely practical. You’ll find some advertising data that may interest you, however.”
From the hour—which grew to an hour and a half—spent in the library, Banneker sought to improve his uncertain conception of his prospective employer’s habit and trend of mind. The hope of revelation was not borne out by the reading matter at hand. Most of it proved to be technical.
When he returned to Marrineal’s den, he found Russell Edmonds with the host.
“Well, son, you’ve turned the trick,” was the veteran’s greeting.
“You’ve read ’em?” asked Banneker, and Marrineal was shrewd enough to note the instinctive shading of manner when expert spoke to expert. He was an outsider, being merely the owner. It amused him.
“Yes. They’re dam’ good.”
“Aren’t they dam’ good?” returned Banneker eagerly.
“They’ll save the day if anything can.”
“Precisely my own humble opinion if a layman may speak,” put in Marrineal. “Mr. Banneker, shall I have the contract drawn up?”
“Not on my account. I don’t need any. If I haven’t made myself so essential after the six months that you have to keep me on, I’ll want to quit.”
“Still in the gambling mood,” smiled Marrineal.
The two practical journalists left, making an appointment to spend the following morning with Marrineal in planning policy and methods. Banneker went back to his apartment and wrote Miss Camilla Van Arsdale all about it, in exultant mood.
“Brains to let! But I’ve got my price. And I’ll get a higher one: the highest, if I can hold out. It’s all due to you. If you hadn’t kept my mind turned to things worth while in the early days at Manzanita, with your music and books and your taste for all that is fine, I’d have fallen into a rut. It’s success, the first real taste. I like it. I love it. And I owe it all to you.”
Camilla Van Arsdale, yearning over the boyish outburst, smiled and sighed and mused and was vaguely afraid, with quasi-maternal fears. She, too, had had her taste of success; a marvelous stimulant, bubbling with inspiration and incitement. But for all except the few who are strong and steadfast, there lurks beneath the effervescence a subtle poison.
CHAPTER XVI
Not being specially gifted with originality of either thought or expression, Mr. Herbert Cressey stopped Banneker outside of his apartment with the remark made and provided for the delayed reunion of frequent companions: “Well I thought you were dead!”
By way of keeping to the same level Banneker replied cheerfully: “I’m not.”
“Where’ve you been all this while?”
“Working.”
“Where were you Monday last? Didn’t see you at Sherry’s.”
“Working.”
“And the week before? You weren’t at The Retreat.”
“Working, also.”
“And the week before that? Nobody’s seen so much—”
“Working. Working. Working.”
“I stopped in at your roost and your new man told me you were away and might be gone indefinitely. Funny chap, your new man. Mysterious sort of manner. Where’d you pick him up?”
“Oh, Lord! Hainer!” exclaimed Banneker appreciatively. “Well, he told the truth.”
“You look pulled down, too, by Jove!” commented Cressey, concern on his sightly face. “Ridin’ for a fall, aren’t you?”
“Only for a test. I’m going to let up next week.”
“Tell you what,” proffered Cressey. “Let’s do a day together. Say Wednesday, eh? I’m giving a little dinner that night. And, oh, I say! By the way—no: never mind that. You’ll come, won’t you? It’ll be at The Retreat.”
“Yes: I’ll come. I’ll be playing polo that afternoon.”
“Not if Jim Maitland sees you first. He’s awfully sore on you for not turning up to practice. Had a place for you on the second team.”
“Don’t want it. I’m through with polo.”
“Ban! What the devil—”
“Work, I tell you. Next season I may be able to play. For the present I’m off everything.”
“Have they made you all the editors of The Ledger in one?”
“I’m off The Ledger, too. Give you all the painful details Wednesday. Fare-you-well.”
General disgust and wrath pervaded the atmosphere of the polo field when Banneker, making his final appearance on Wednesday, broke the news to Maitland, Densmore, and the others.
“Just as you were beginning to know one end of your stick from the other,” growled the irate team captain.
Banneker played well that afternoon because he played recklessly. Lack of practice sometimes works out that way; as if luck took charge of a man’s play and carried him through. Three of the five goals made by the second team fell to his mallet, and he left the field heartily cursed on all sides for his recalcitrancy in throwing himself away on work when the sport of sports called him. Regretful, yet well pleased with himself, he had his bath, his one, lone drink, and leisurely got into his evening clothes. Cressey met him at the entry to the guest’s lounge giving on the general dining-room.
“Damned if you’re not a good-lookin’ chap, Ban!” he declared with something like envy in his voice. “Thinning down a bit gives you a kind of look. No wonder Mertoun puts in his best licks on your clothes.”
“Which reminds me that I’ve neglected even Mertoun,” smiled Banneker.
“Go ahead in, will you? I’ve got to bone some feller for a fresh collar. My cousin’s in there somewhere. Mrs. Rogerson Lyle from Philadelphia. She’s a pippin in pink. Go in and tell on yourself, and order her a cocktail.”
Seeking to follow the vague direction, Banneker turned to the left and entered a dim side room. No pippin in pink disclosed herself. But a gracious young figure in black was bending over a table looking at a magazine, the long, free curve of her back turned toward him. He advanced. The woman said in a soft voice that shook him to the depths of his soul:
“Back so soon, Archie? Want Sis to fix your tie?”
She turned then and said easily: “Oh, I thought you were my brother.... How do you do, Ban?”
Io held out her hand to him. He hardly knew whether or not he took it until he felt the close, warm pressure of her fingers. Never before had he so poignantly realized that innate splendor of femininity that was uniquely hers, a quality more potent than any mere beauty. Her look met his straight and frankly, but he heard the breath flutter at her lips, and he thought to read in her eyes a question, a hunger, and a delight. His voice was under rigid control as he said:
“I didn’t know you were to be here, Mrs. Eyre.”
“I knew that you were,” she retorted. “And I’m not Mrs. Eyre, please. I’m Io.”
He shook his head. “That was in another world.”
“Oh, Ban, Ban!” she said. Her lips seemed to cherish the name that they gave forth so softly. “Don’t be a silly Ban. It’s the same world, only older; a million years older, I think.... I came here only because you were coming. Are you a million years older, Ban?”
“Unfair,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m never unfair. I play the game.” Her little, firm chin went up defiantly. Yes: she was more lovely and vivid and desirable than in the other days. Or was it only the unstifled yearning in his heart that made her seem so? “Have you missed me?” she asked simply.
He made no answer.
“I’ve missed you.” She walked over to the window and stood looking out into the soft and breathing murk of the night. When she came back to him, her manner had changed. “Fancy finding you here of all places!” she said gayly.
“It isn’t such a bad place to be,” he said, relieved to meet her on the new ground.
“It’s a goal,” she declared. “Half of the aspiring gilded youth of the city would give their eye-teeth to make it. How did you manage?”
“I didn’t manage. It was managed for me. Old Poultney Masters put me in.”
“Well, don’t scowl at me! For a reporter, you know, it’s rather an achievement to get into The Retreat.”
“I suppose so. Though I’m not a reporter now.”
“Well, for any newspaper man. What are you, by the way?”
“A sort of all-round experimental editor.”
“I hadn’t heard of that,” said Io, with a quickness which apprised him that she had been seeking information about him.
“Nobody has. It’s only just happened.”
“And I’m the first to know of it? That’s as it should be,” she asserted calmly. “You shall tell me all about it at dinner.”
“Am I taking you in?”
“No: you’re taking in my cousin, Esther Forbes. But I’m on your left. Be nice to me.”
Others came in and joined them. Banneker, his inner brain a fiery whorl, though the outer convolutions which he used for social purposes remained quite under control, drifted about making himself agreeable and approving himself to his host as an asset of the highest value. At dinner, sprightly and mischievous Miss Forbes, who recalled their former meeting at Sherry’s, found him wholly delightful and frankly told him so. He talked little with Io; but he was conscious to his nerve-ends of the sweet warmth of her so near him. To her questions about his developing career he returned vague replies or generalizations.
“You’re not drinking anything,” she said, as the third course came on. “Have you renounced the devil and all his works?” There was an impalpable stress upon the “all.”
His answer, composed though it was in tone, quite satisfied her. “I wouldn’t dare touch drink to-night.”
After dinner there was faro bank. Banneker did not play. Io, after a run of indifferent luck, declared herself tired of the game and turned to him.
“Take me out somewhere where there is air to breathe.”
They stood together on the stone terrace, blown lightly upon by a mist-ladden breeze.
“It ought to be a great drive of rain, filling the world,” said Io in her voice of dreams. “The roar of waters above us and below, and the glorious sense of being in the grip of a resistless current.... We’re all in the grip of resistless currents. D’you believe that yet, Ban?”
“No.”
“Skeptic! You want to work out your own fate. You ‘strive to see, to choose your path.’ Well, you’ve climbed. Is it success. Ban?”
“It will be.”
“And have you reached the Mountains of Fulfillment?”
He shook his head. “One never does, climbing alone.”
“Has it been alone, Ban?”
“Yes.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“So it has been for me—really. No,” she added swiftly; “don’t ask me questions. Not now. I want to hear more of your new venture.”
He outlined his plan and hopes for The Patriot.
“It’s good,” she said gravely. “It’s power, and so it’s danger. But it’s good.... Are we friends, Ban?”
“How can we be!”
“How can we not be! You’ve tried to drop me out of your life. Oh, I know, because I know you—better than you think. You’ll never drop me out of your life again,” she murmured with confident wistfulness. “Never, Ban.... Let’s go in.”
Not until she came to bid him good-night, with a lingering handclasp, her palm cleaving to his like the reluctant severance of lips, did she tell him that she was going away almost immediately. “But I had to make sure first that you were really alive, and still Ban,” she said.
It was many months before he saw her again.
PART III—FULFILLMENT
CHAPTER I
The House With Three Eyes sent forth into the darkness a triple glow of hospitality. Through the aloof Chelsea district street, beyond the westernmost L structure, came taxicabs, hansoms, private autos, to discharge at the central door men who were presently revealed, under the lucent globe above the lintel, to be for the most part silhouette studies in the black of festal tailoring and silk hat against the white of expansive shirt-front. Occasionally, though less often, one of the doors at either flank of the house, also overwatched by shining orbs, opened to discharge an early departure. A midnight wayfarer, pausing opposite to contemplate this inexplicable grandeur in a dingy neighborhood, sought enlightenment from the passing patrolman:
“Wot’s doin’? Swell gamblin’ joint? Huh?” As he spoke a huge, silent car crept swiftly to the entry, which opened to swallow up two bareheaded, luxuriously befurred women, with their escorts. The curious wayfarer promptly amended his query, though not for the better.
“Naw!” replied the policeman with scorn. “That’s Mr. Banneker’s house.”
“Banneker? Who’s Banneker?”
With augmented contempt the officer requested the latest quotations on clover seed. “He’s the editor of The Patriot,” he vouchsafed. “A millionaire, too, they say. And a good sport.”
“Givin’ a party, huh?”
“Every Saturday night,” answered he of the uniform and night-stick, who, having participated below-stairs in the reflections of the entertainment, was condescending enough to be informative. “Say, the swellest folks in New York fall over themselves to get invited here.”
“Why ain’t he on Fi’th Avenyah, then?” demanded the other.
“He makes the Fi’th Avenyah bunch come to him,” explained the policeman, with obvious pride. “Took a couple of these old houses on long lease, knocked out the walls, built ’em into one, on his own plan, and, say! It’s a pallus! I been all through it.”
A lithely powerful figure took the tall steps of the house three at a time, and turned, under the light, to toss away a cigar.
“Cheest!” exclaimed the wayfarer in tones of awe: “that’s K.O. Doyle, the middleweight, ain’t it?”
“Sure! That’s nothin’. If you was to get inside there you’d bump into some of the biggest guys in town; a lot of high-ups from Wall Street, and maybe a couple of these professors from Columbyah College, and some swell actresses, and a bunch of high-brow writers and painters, and a dozen dames right off the head of the Four Hundred list. He takes ’em, all kinds, Mr. Banneker does, just so they’re somethin’. He’s a wonder.”
The wayfarer passed on to his oniony boarding-house, a few steps along, deeply marveling at the irruption of magnificence into the neighborhood in the brief year since he had been away.
Equipages continued to draw up, unload, and withdraw, until twelve thirty, when, without so much as a preliminary wink, the House shut its Three Eyes. A scant five minutes earlier, an alert but tired-looking man, wearing the slouch hat of the West above his dinner coat, had briskly mounted the steps and, after colloquy with the cautious, black guardian of the door, had been admitted to a side room, where he was presently accosted by a graying, spare-set guest with ruminative eyes.
“I heard about this show by accident, and wanted in,” explained the newcomer in response to the other’s look of inquiry. “If I could see Banneker—”
“It will be some little time before you can see him. He’s at work.”
“But this is his party, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The party takes care of itself until he comes down.”
“Oh; does it? Well, will it take care of me?”
“Are you a friend of Mr. Banneker’s?”
“In a way. In fact, I might claim to have started him on his career of newspaper crime. I’m Gardner of the Angelica City Herald.”
“Ban will be glad to see you. Take off your things. I am Russell Edmonds.”
He led the way into a spacious and beautiful room, filled with the composite hum of voices and the scent of half-hidden flowers. The Westerner glanced avidly about him, noting here a spoken name familiar in print, there a face recognized from far-spread photographic reproduction.
“Some different from Ban’s shack on the desert,” he muttered. “Hello! Mr. Edmonds, who’s the splendid-looking woman in brown with the yellow orchids, over there in the seat back of the palms?”
Edmonds leaned forward to look. “Royce Melvin, the composer, I believe. I haven’t met her.”
“I have, then,” returned the other, as the guest changed her position, fully revealing her face. “Tried to dig some information out of her once. Like picking prickly pears blindfold. That’s Camilla Van Arsdale. What a coincidence to find her here!”
“No! Camilla Van Arsdale? You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I want to speak to her. Make yourself known to any one you like the looks of. That’s the rule of the house; no introductions.”
He walked across the room, made his way through the crescent curving about Miss Van Arsdale, and, presenting himself, was warmly greeted.
“Let me take you to Ban,” he said. “He’ll want to see you at once.”
“But won’t it disturb his work?”
“Nothing does. He writes with an open door and a shut brain.”
He led her up the east flight of stairs and down a long hallway to an end room with door ajar, notwithstanding that even at that distance the hum of voices and the muffled throbbing of the concert grand piano from below were plainly audible. Banneker’s voice, regular, mechanical, desensitized as the voices of those who dictate habitually are prone to become, floated out:
“Quote where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise end quote comma said a poet who was also a cynic period. Many poets are comma but not the greatest period. Because of their—turn back to the beginning of the paragraph, please, Miss Westlake.”
“I’ve brought up an old friend, Ban,” announced Edmonds, pushing wide the door.
Vaguely smiling, for he had trained himself to be impervious to interruptions, the editorializer turned in his chair. Instantly he sprang to his feet, and caught Miss Van Arsdale by both hands.
“Miss Camilla!” he cried. “I thought you said you couldn’t come.”
“I’m defying the doctors,” she replied. “They’ve given me so good a report of myself that I can afford to. I’ll go down now and wait for you.”
“No; don’t. Sit up here with me till I finish. I don’t want to lose any of you,” said he affectionately.
But she laughingly refused, declaring that he would be through all the sooner for his other guests, if she left him.
“See that she meets some people, Bop,” Banneker directed. “Gaines of The New Era, if he’s here, and Betty Raleigh, and that new composer, and the Junior Masters.”
Edmonds nodded, and escorted her downstairs. Nicely judging the time when Banneker would have finished, he was back in quarter of an hour. The stenographer had just left.
“What a superb woman, Ban!” he said. “It’s small wonder that Enderby lost himself.”
Banneker nodded. “What would she have said if she could know that you, an absolute stranger, had been the means of saving her from a terrific scandal? Gives one a rather shivery feeling about the power and responsibility of the press, doesn’t it?”
“It would have been worse than murder,” declared the veteran, with so much feeling that his friend gave him a grateful look. “What’s she doing in New York? Is it safe?”
“Came on to see a specialist. Yes; it’s all right. The Enderbys are abroad.”
“I see. How long since you’d seen her?”
“Before this trip? Last spring, when I took a fortnight off.”
“You went clear West, just to see her?”
“Mainly. Partly, too, to get back to the restfulness of the place where I never had any troubles. I’ve kept the little shack I used to own; pay a local chap named Mindle to keep it in shape. So I just put in a week of quiet there.”
“You’re a queer chap, Ban. And a loyal one.”
“If I weren’t loyal to Camilla Van Arsdale—” said Banneker, and left the implication unconcluded.
“Another friend from your picturesque past is down below,” said Edmonds, and named Gardner.
“Lord! That fellow nearly cost me my life, last time we met,” laughed Banneker. Then his face altered. Pain drew its sharp lines there, pain and the longing of old memories still unassuaged. “Just the same, I’ll be glad to see him.”
He sought out the Californian, found him deep in talk with Guy Mallory of The Ledger, who had come in late, gave him hearty greeting, and looked about for Camilla Van Arsdale. She was supping in the center of a curiously assorted group, part of whom remembered the old romance of her life, and part of whom had identified her, by some chance, as Royce Melvin, the composer. All of them were paying court to her charm and intelligence. She made a place beside herself for Banneker.
“We’ve been discussing The Patriot, Ban,” she said, “and Mr. Gaines has embalmed you, as an editorial writer, in the amber of one of his best epigrams.”
The Great Gaines made a deprecating gesture. “My little efforts always sound better when I’m not present,” he protested.
“To be the subject of any Gaines epigram, however stinging, is fame in itself,” said Banneker.
“And no sting in this one. ‘Attic salt and American pep,’” she quoted. “Isn’t it truly spicy?”
Banneker bowed with half-mocking appreciation. “I fancy, though, that Mr. Gaines prefers his journalistic egg more au naturel.”
“Sometimes,” admitted the most famous of magazine editors, “I could dispense with some of the pep.”
“I like the pep, too, Ban.” Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice. “I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them. But the rest of the paper—Oh, dear! It screeches.”
“Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it,” said Banneker pleasantly.
“Isn’t it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?” suggested the mathematician.
“Shouting against each other,” said Gaines.
“Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows,” put in Junior Masters.
“Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?” inquired Betty.
“Wouldn’t sell a ticket,” declared Banneker.
“Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find,” pointed out Edmonds, “the effect will pall.”
“Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow’s war whoop,” surmised Masters.
“I have never particularly admired the steam calliope as a form of expression,” observed Miss Van Arsdale.
“Ah!” said the actress, smiling, “but Royce Melvin doesn’t make music for circuses.”
“And a modern newspaper is a circus,” pronounced the satyr-like scholar.
“Three-ring variety; all the latest stunts; list to the voice of the ballyhoo,” said Masters.
“Panem et circenses” pursued the mathematician, pleased with his simile, “to appease the howling rabble. But it is mostly circus, and very little bread that our emperors of the news give us.”
“We’ve got to feed what the animal eats,” defended Banneker lightly.
“After having stimulated an artificial appetite,” said Edmonds.
As the talk flowed on, Betty Raleigh adroitly drew Banneker out of the current of it. “Your Patriot needn’t have screeched at me, Ban,” she murmured in an injured tone.
“Did it, Betty? How, when, and where?”
“I thought you were horridly patronizing about the new piece, and quite unkind to me, for a friend.”
“It wasn’t my criticism, you know,” he reminded her patiently. “I don’t write the whole paper, though most of my acquaintances seem to think that I do. Any and all of it to which they take exception, at least.”
“Of course, I know you didn’t write it, or it wouldn’t have been so stupid. I could stand anything except the charge that I’ve lost my naturalness and become conventional.”
“You’re like the man who could resist anything except temptation, my dear: you can stand anything except criticism,” returned Banneker with a smile so friendly that there was no sting in the words. “You’ve never had enough of that. You’re the spoiled pet of the critics.”
“Not of this new one of yours. He’s worse than Gurney. Who is he and where does he come from?”
“An inconsiderable hamlet known as Chicago. Name, Allan Haslett. Dramatic criticism out there is still so unsophisticated as to be intelligent as well as honest—at its best.”
“Which it isn’t here,” commented the special pet of the theatrical reviewers.
“Well, I thought a good new man would be better than the good old ones. Less hampered by personal considerations. So I sent and got this one.”
“But he isn’t good. He’s a horrid beast. We’ve been specially nice to him, on your account mostly—Ban, if you grin that way I shall hate you! I had Bezdek invite him to one of the rehearsal suppers and he wouldn’t come. Sent word that theatrical suppers affected his eyesight when he came to see the play.”
Banneker chuckled. “Just why I got him. He doesn’t let the personal element prejudice him.”
“He is prejudiced. And most unfair. Ban,” said Betty in her most seductive tones, “do call him down. Make him write something decent about us. Bez is fearfully upset.”
Banneker sighed. “The curse of this business,” he reflected aloud, “is that every one regards The Patriot as my personal toy for me or my friends to play with.”
“This isn’t play at all. It’s very much earnest. Do be nice about it, Ban.”
“Betty, do you remember a dinner party in the first days of our acquaintance, at which I told you that you represented one essential difference from all the other women there?”
“Yes. I thought you were terribly presuming.”
“I told you that you were probably the only woman present who wasn’t purchasable.”
“Not understanding you as well as I do now, I was quite shocked. Besides, it was so unfair. Nearly all of them were most respectable married people.”
“Bought by their most respectable husbands. Some of ’em bought away from other husbands. But I gave you credit for not being on that market—or any other. And now you’re trying to corrupt my professional virtue.”
“Ban! I’m not.”
“What else is it when you try to use your influence to have me fire our nice, new critic?”
“If that’s being corruptible, I wonder if any of us are incorruptible.” She stretched upward an idle hand and fondled a spray of freesia that drooped against her cheek. “Ban; there’s something I’ve been waiting to tell you. Tertius Marrineal wants to marry me.”
“I’ve suspected as much. That would settle the obnoxious critic, wouldn’t it! Though it’s rather a roundabout way.”
“Ban! You’re beastly.”
“Yes; I apologize,” he replied quickly. “But—have I got to revise my estimate of you, Betty? I should hate to.”
“Your estimate? Oh, as to purchasability. That’s worse than what you’ve just said. Yet, somehow, I don’t resent it. Because it’s honest, I suppose,” she said pensively. “No: it wouldn’t be a—a market deal. I like Tertius. I like him a lot. I won’t pretend that I’m madly in love with him. But—”
“Yes; I know,” he said gently, as she paused, looking at him steadily, but with clouded eyes. He read into that “but” a world of opportunities; a theater of her own—the backing of a powerful newspaper—wealth—and all, if she so willed it, without interruption to her professional career.
“Would you think any the less of me?” she asked wistfully.
“Would you think any the less of yourself?” he countered.
The blossoming spray broke under her hand. “Ah, yes; that’s the question after all, isn’t it?” she murmured.
Meantime, Gardner, the eternal journalist, fostering a plan of his own, was gathering material from Guy Mallory who had come in late.
“What gets me,” he said, looking over at the host, “is how he can do a day’s work with all this social powwow going on.”
“A day’s? He does three days’ work in every one. He’s the hardest trained mind in the business. Why, he could sit down here this minute, in the middle of this room, and dictate an editorial while keeping up his end in the general talk. I’ve seen him do it.”
“He must be a wonder at concentration.”
“Concentration? If he didn’t invent it, he perfected it. Tell you a story. Ban doesn’t go in for any game except polo. One day some of the fellows at The Retreat got talking golf to him—”
“The Retreat? Good Lord! He doesn’t belong to The Retreat, does he?”
“Yes; been a member for years. Well, they got him to agree to try it. Jim Tamson, the pro—he’s supposed to be the best instructor in America—was there then. Banneker went out to the first tee, a 215-yard hole, watched Jim perform his show-em-how swing, asked a couple of questions. ‘Eye on the ball,’ says Jim. ‘That’s nine tenths of it. The rest is hitting it easy and following through. Simple and easy,’ says Jim, winking to himself. Banneker tries two or three clubs to see which feels easiest to handle, picks out a driving-iron, and slams the ball almost to the edge of the green. Chance? Of course, there was some luck in it. But it was mostly his everlasting ability to keep his attention focused. Jim almost collapsed. ‘First time I ever saw a beginner that didn’t top,’ says he. ‘You’ll make a golfer, Mr. Banneker.’
“‘Not me,’ says Ban. ‘This game is too easy. It doesn’t interest me.’ He hands Jim a twenty-dollar bill, thanks him, goes in and has his bath, and has never touched a golf-stick since.”
Gardner had been listening with a kindling eye. He brought his fist down on his knee. “You’ve told me something!” he exclaimed.
“Going to try it out on your own game?”
“Not about golf. About Banneker. I’ve been wondering how he managed to establish himself as an individual figure in this big town. Now I begin to see it. It’s publicity; that’s what it is. He’s got the sense of how to make himself talked about. He’s picturesque. I’ll bet Banneker’s first and last golf shot is a legend in the clubs yet, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” confirmed Mallory. “But do you really think that he reasoned it all out on the spur of the moment?”
“Oh, reasoned; probably not. It’s instinctive, I tell you. And the twenty to the professional was a touch of genius. Tamson will never stop talking about it. Can’t you hear him, telling it to his fellow pros? Golf’s too easy for me,’ he says, ‘and hands me a double sawbuck! Did ye ever hear the like!’ And so the legend is built up. It’s a great thing to become a local legend. I know, for I’ve built up a few of ’em myself.... I suppose the gun-play on the river-front gave him his start at it and the rest came easy.”
“Ask him. He’ll probably tell you,” said Mallory. “At least, he’ll be interested in your theory.”
Gardner strolled over to Banneker’s group, not for the purpose of adopting Mallory’s suggestion, for he was well satisfied with his own diagnosis, but to congratulate him upon the rising strength of The Patriot. As he approached, Miss Van Arsdale, in response to a plea from Betty Raleigh, went to the piano, and the dwindled crowd settled down into silence. For music, at The House With Three Eyes, was invariably the sort of music that people listen to; that is, the kind of people whom Banneker gathered around him.
After she had played, Miss Van Arsdale declared that she must go, whereupon Banneker insisted upon taking her to her hotel. To her protests against dragging him away from his own party, he retorted that the party could very well run itself without him; his parties often did, when he was specially pressed in his work. Accepting this, his friend elected to walk; she wanted to hear more about The Patriot. What did she think of it, he asked.
“I don’t expect you to like it,” he added.
“That doesn’t matter. I do tremendously admire your editorials. They’re beautifully done; the perfection of clarity. But the rest of the paper—I can’t see you in it.”
“Because I’m not there, as an individual.”
He expounded to her his theory of journalism. That was a just characterization of Junior Masters, he said: the three-ringed circus. He, Banneker, would run any kind of a circus they wanted, to catch and hold their eyes; the sensational acts, the clowns of the funny pages, the blare of the bands, the motion, the color, and the spangles; all to beguile them into reading and eventually to thinking.
“But we haven’t worked it out yet, as we should. What I’m really aiming at is a saturated solution, as the chemists say: Not a saturated solution of circulation, for that isn’t possible, but a saturated solution of influence. If we can’t put The Patriot into every man’s house, we ought to be able to put it into every man’s mind. All things to all men: that’s the formula. We’re far from it yet, but we’re on the road. And in the editorials, I’m making people stir their minds about real things who never before developed a thought beyond the everyday, mechanical processes of living.”
“To what end?” she asked doubtfully.
“Does it matter? Isn’t the thinking, in itself, end enough?”
“Brutish thinking if it’s represented in your screaming headlines.”
“Predigested news. I want to preserve all their brain-power for my editorial page. And, oh, how easy I make it for them! Thoughts of one syllable.”
“And you use your power over their minds to incite them to discontent.”
“Certainly.”
“But that’s dreadful, Ban! To stir up bitterness and rancor among people.”
“Don’t you be misled by cant, Miss Camilla,” adjured Banneker. “The contented who have everything to make them content have put a stigma on discontent. They’d have us think it a crime. It isn’t. It’s a virtue.”
“Ban! A virtue?”
“Well; isn’t it? Call it by the other name, ambition. What then?”
Miss Van Arsdale pondered with troubled eyes. “I see what you mean,” she confessed. “But the discontent that arises within one’s self is one thing; the ‘divine discontent.’ It’s quite another to foment it for your own purposes in the souls of others.”
“That depends upon the purpose. If the purpose is to help the others, through making their discontent effective to something better, isn’t it justified?”
“But isn’t there always the danger of making a profession of discontent?”
“That’s a shrewd hit,” confessed Banneker. “I’ve suspected that Marrineal means to capitalize it eventually, though I don’t know just how. He’s a secret sort of animal, Marrineal.”
“But he gives you a free hand?” she asked.
“He has to,” said Banneker simply.
Camilla Van Arsdale sighed. “It’s success, Ban. Isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s success. In its kind.”
“Is it happiness?”
“Yes. Also in its kind.”
“The real kind? The best kind?”
“It’s satisfaction. I’m doing what I want to do.”
She sighed. “I’d hoped for something more.”
He shook his head. “One can’t have everything.”
“Why not?” she demanded almost fiercely. “You ought to have. You’re made for it.” After a pause she added: “Then it isn’t Betty Raleigh. I’d hoped it was. I’ve been watching her. There’s character there, Ban, as well as charm.”
“She has other interests. No; it isn’t Betty.”
“Ban, there are times when I could hate her,” broke out Miss Van Arsdale.
“Who? Betty?”
“You know whom well enough.”
“I stand corrected in grammar as well as fact,” he said lightly.
“Have you seen her?”
“Yes. I see her occasionally. Not often.”
“Does she come here?”
“She has been.”
“And her husband?”
“No.”