“Ban, aren’t you ever going to get over it?”
He looked at her silently.
“No; you won’t. There are a few of us like that. God help us!” said Camilla Van Arsdale.
CHAPTER II
Others than Banneker’s friends and frequenters now evinced symptoms of interest in his influence upon his environment. Approve him you might, or disapprove him; the palpable fact remained that he wielded a growing power. Several promising enterprises directed at the City Treasury had aborted under destructive pressure from his pen. A once impregnably cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a two weeks’ “vacation” of Banneker’s at the State Capitol. He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties. Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they overlap, took thoughtful heed of him. How could they make him useful? Or, at least, prevent him from being harmful?
No less a potentate than Poultney Masters had sought illumination from Willis Enderby upon the subject in the days when people in street-cars first began to rustle through the sheets of The Patriot, curious to see what the editorial had to say to them that day.
“What do you think of him?” began the magnate.
“Able,” grunted the other.
“If he weren’t, I wouldn’t be troubling my head about him. What else? Dangerous?”
“As dangerous as he is upright. Exactly.”
“Now, I wonder what the devil you mean by that, Enderby,” said the financier testily. “Dangerous as long as he’s upright? Eh? And dangerous to what?”
“To anything he goes after. He’s got a following. I might almost say a blind following.”
“Got a boss, too, hasn’t he?”
“Marrineal? Ah, I don’t know how far Marrineal interferes. And I don’t know Marrineal.”
“Upright, too; that one?” The sneer in Masters’s heavy voice was palpable.
“You consider that no newspaper can be upright,” the lawyer interpreted.
“I’ve bought ’em and bluffed ’em and stood ’em in a corner to be good,” returned the other simply. “What would you expect my opinion to be?”
“The Sphere, among them?” queried the lawyer.
“Damn The Sphere!” exploded the other. “A dirty, muck-grubbing, lying, crooked rag.”
“Your actual grudge against it is not for those latter qualities, though,” pointed out Enderby. “On questions where it conflicts with your enterprises, it’s straight enough. That’s it’s defect. Upright equals dangerous. You perceive?”
Masters shrugged the problem away with a thick and ponderous jerk of his shoulders. “What’s young Banneker after?” he demanded.
“You ought to know him as well as I. He’s a sort of protégé of yours, isn’t he?”
“At The Retreat, you mean? I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff. Now the young squirt won’t practice enough to be certain team material.”
“Found a bigger game.”
“Umph! But what’s in back of it?”
“It’s the game for the game’s sake with him, I suspect. I can only tell you that, wherever I’ve had contact with him, he has been perfectly straightforward.”
“Maybe. But what about this anarchistic stuff of his?”
“Oh, anarchistic! You mean his attacks on Wall Street? The Stock Exchange isn’t synonymous with the Constitution of the United States, you know, Masters. Do moderate your language.”
“Now you’re laughing at me, damn you, Enderby.”
“It’s good for you. You ought to laugh at yourself more. Ask Banneker what he’s at. Very probably he’ll laugh at you inside. But he’ll answer you.”
“That reminds me. He had an editorial last week that stuck to me. It is the bitter laughter of the people that shakes thrones. Have a care, you money kings, not to become too ridiculous!’ Isn’t that socialist-anarchist stuff?”
“It’s very young stuff. But it’s got a quality, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, hell, yes; quality!” rumbled the profane old man. “Well, I will tackle your young prodigy one of these days.”
Which, accordingly, he did, encountering, some days later, Banneker in the reading-room at The Retreat.
“What are you up to; making trouble with that editorial screed of yours?” he growled at the younger man.
Banneker smiled. He accepted that growl from Poultney Masters, not because Masters was a great and formidable figure in the big world, but because beneath the snarl there was a quality of—no, not of friendliness, but of man-to-man approach.
“No. I’m trying to cure trouble, not make it.”
“Umph! Queer idea of curing. Here we are in the midst of good times, everywhere, and you talk about—what was the stuff?—oh, yes: ‘The grinning mask of prosperity, beneath which Want searches with haggard and threatening eyes for the crust denied.’ Fine stuff!”
“Not mine. I don’t write as beautifully as all that. It’s quoted from a letter. But I’ll take the responsibility, since I quoted it. There’s some truth in it, you know.”
“Not a hair’s-weight. If you fill the minds of the ignorant with that sort of thing, where shall we end?”
“If you fill the minds of the ignorant, they will no longer be ignorant.”
“Then they’ll be above their class and their work. Our whole trouble is in that; people thinking they’re too good for the sort of work they’re fitted for.”
“Aren’t they too good if they can think themselves into something better?”
Poultney Masters delivered himself of a historical profundity. “The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will have something to answer for.”
“Destructive, isn’t it?” said Banneker, looking up quickly.
“Now, you want to go farther. You want to teach ’em to think.”
“Exactly. Why not?”
“Why not? Why, because, you young idiot, they’ll think wrong.”
“Very likely. At first. We all had to spell wrong before we spelled right. What if people do think wrong? It’s the thinking that’s important. Eventually they’ll think right.”
“With the newspapers to guide them?” There was a world of scorn in the magnate’s voice.
“Some will guide wrong. Some will guide right. The most I hope to do is to teach ’em a little to use their minds. Education and a fair field. To find out and to make clear what is found; that’s the business of a newspaper as I see it.”
“Tittle-tattle. Tale-mongering,” was Masters’s contemptuous qualification.
“A royal mission,” laughed Banneker. “I call the Sage to witness. ‘But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.’”
“But they’ve got to be kings,” retorted the other quickly. “It’s a tricky business, Banneker. Better go in for polo. We need you.” He lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his shoulder: “Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo isn’t a better game and a cleaner.”
What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all, thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter, except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby and Gaines. Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view, as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to the West. Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor’s pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question:
“And you have made all this, Ban?”
“At least I’ve remade it.”
She shook her head. “No; as I told you before, I can’t see you in it.”
“You mean, it doesn’t express me. It isn’t meant to.’
“Whom does it express, then? Mr. Marrineal?”
“No. It isn’t an expression at all in that sense. It’s a—a response. A response to the demand of hundreds of thousands of people who have never had a newspaper made for them before.”
“An echo of vox populi? Does that excuse its sins?”
“I’m not putting it forth as an excuse. Is it really sins or only bad taste that offends you?”
“Clever, Ban. And true in a measure. But insincerity is more than bad taste. It’s one of the primal sins.”
“You find The Patriot insincere?”
“Can I find it anything else, knowing you?”
“Ah, there you go wrong again, Miss Camilla. As an expression of my ideals, the news part of the paper would be insincere. I don’t like it much better than you do. But I endure it; yes, I’ll be frank and admit that I even encourage it, because it gives me wider scope for the things I want to say. Sincere things. I’ve never yet written in my editorial column anything that I don’t believe from the bottom of my soul. Take that as a basis on which to judge me.”
“My dear Ban! I don’t want to judge you.”
“I want you to,” he cried eagerly. “I want your judgment and your criticism. But you must see what I’m aiming for. Miss Camilla, I’m making people stir their minds and think who never before had a thought beyond the everyday processes of life.”
“For your own purposes? Thought, as you manipulate it, might be a high-explosive. Have you thought of using it in that way?”
“If I found a part of the social edifice that had to be blown to pieces, I might.”
“Take care that you don’t involve us all in the crash. Meantime, what is the rest of your editorial page; a species of sedative to lull their minds? Who is Evadne Ellington?”
“One of our most prominent young murderesses.”
“And you let her sign a column on your page?”
“Oh, she’s a highly moral murderess. Killed her lover in defense of her honor, you know. Which means that she shot him when he got tired of her. A sobbing jury promptly acquitted her, and now she’s writing ‘Warnings to Young Girls.’ They’re most improving and affecting, I assure you. We look after that.”
“Ban! I hate to have you so cynical.”
“Not at all,” he protested. “Ask the Prevention of Vice people and the criminologists. They’ll tell you that Evadne’s column is a real influence for good among the people who read and believe it.”
“What class is Reformed Rennigan’s sermon aimed at?” she inquired, with wrinkling nostrils. “‘Soaking it to Satan’; is that another regular feature?”
“Twice a week. It gives us a Y.M.C.A. circulation that is worth a good deal to us. Outside of my double column, the page is a sort of forum. I’ll take anything that is interesting or authoritative. For example, if Royce Melvin had something of value to say to the public about music, where else could she find so wide a hearing as through The Patriot?”
“No, I thank you,” returned his visitor dryly.
“No? Are you sure? What is your opinion of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as a national song?”
“It’s dreadful.”
“Why?”
“For every reason. The music misfits the words. It’s beyond the range of most voices. The harmonies are thin. No crowd in the world can sing it. What is the value or inspiration of a national song that the people can’t sing?”
“Ask it of The Patriot’s public. I’ll follow it up editorially; ‘Wanted; A Song for America.’”
“I will,” she answered impulsively. Then she laughed. “Is that the way you get your contributors?”
“Often, as the spider said to the fly,” grinned Banneker the shameless. “Take a thousand words or more and let us have your picture.”
“No. Not that. I’ve seen my friends’ pictures too often in your society columns. By the way, how comes it that a paper devoted to the interests of the common people maintains that aristocratic feature?”
“Oh, the common people eat it alive. Russell Edmonds is largely responsible for keeping it up. You should hear his theory. It’s ingenious. I’ll send for him.”
Edmonds, who chanced to be at his desk, entered the editorial den with his tiny pipe between his teeth, and, much disconcerted at finding a lady there, hastily removed it until Miss Van Arsdale suggested its restitution.
“What? The society page?” said he. “Yes; I was against dropping it. You see, Miss Van Arsdale, I’m a Socialist in belief.”
“Is there a pun concealed in that or are you serious, Mr. Edmonds?”
“Serious. I’m always that on the subjects of Socialism and The Patriot.”
“Then you must explain if I’m to understand.”
“By whom is society news read? By two classes,” expounded the veteran; “those whose names appear, and those who are envious of those whose names appear. Well, we’re after the envious.”
“Still I don’t see. With what purpose?’
“Jim Simpson, who has just got his grocery bill for more than he can pay, reads a high-colored account of Mrs. Stumpley-Triggs’s aquatic dinner served in the hundred-thousand-dollar swimming-pool on her Westchester estate. That makes Jim think.”
“You mean that it makes him discontented.”
“Well, discontent is a mighty leaven.”
Miss Van Arsdale directed her fine and serious eyes upon Banneker. “So it comes back to the cult of discontent. Is that Mr. Marrineal’s formula, too, Mr. Edmonds?”
“Underneath all his appearance of candor, Marrineal’s a secret animal,” said Edmonds.
“Does he leave you a free hand with your editorials, Ban?” inquired the outsider.
“Absolutely.”
“Watches the circulation only,” said Edmonds. “Thus far,” he added.
“You’re looking for an ulterior motive, then,” interpreted Miss Van Arsdale.
“I’m looking for whatever I can find in Marrineal, Miss Van Arsdale,” confessed the patriarch of the office. “As yet I haven’t found much.”
“I have,” said Banneker. “I’ve discovered his theory of journalism. We three, Edmonds, Marrineal, and I, regard this business from three diverse viewpoints. To Edmonds it’s a vocation and a rostrum. He wants really, under his guise as the most far-seeing news man of his time, to call sinners against society to repentance, or to force repentance down their throats. There’s a good deal of the stern evangelist about you, you know, Pop.”
“And you?” The other’s smile seemed enmeshed in the dainty spiral of smoke brooding above his pursed lips.
“Oh, I’m more the pedagogue. With me, too, the game is a vocation. But it’s a different one. I’d like to marshal men’s minds as a generalissimo marshals armies.”
“In the bonds of your own discipline?” asked Miss Van Arsdale.
“If I could chain a mind I’d be the most splendid tyrant of history. No. Free leadership of the free is good enough.”
“If Marrineal will leave you free,” commented the veteran. “What’s your diagnosis of Marrineal, then?”
“A priest of Baal.”
“With The Patriot in the part of Baal?”
“Not precisely The Patriot. Publicity, rather, of which The Patriot is merely the instrument. Marrineal’s theory of publicity is interesting. It may even be true. Substantially it is this: All civilized Americans fear and love print; that is to say, Publicity, for which read Baal. They fear it for what it may do to them. They love and fawn on it for what it may do for them. It confers the boon of glory and launches the bolts of shame. Its favorites, made and anointed from day to day, are the blessed of their time. Those doomed by it are the outcasts. It sits in momentary judgment, and appeal from its decisions is too late to avail anything to its victims. A species of auto-juggernaut, with Marrineal at the wheel.”
“What rubbish!” said Miss Van Arsdale with amused scorn.
“Oh, because you’ve nothing to ask or fear from Baal. Yet even you would use it, for your musical preachment.”
As he spoke, he became aware of Edmonds staring moodily and with pinched lips at Miss Van Arsdale. To the mind’s eye of the old stager had flashed a sudden and astounding vision of all that pride of womanhood and purity underlying the beauty of the face, overlaid and fouled by the inky vomit of Baal of the printing-press, as would have come to pass had not he, Edmonds, obstructed the vengeance.
“I can imagine nothing printed,” said the woman who had loved Willis Enderby, “that could in any manner influence my life.”
“Fortunate you!” Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor. “But you live in a world of your own making. Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it.”
“He once said to me,” remarked Banneker, “that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it.”
“I’m not sure that I understand what he means,” said Miss Van Arsdale, “but it has a sinister sound.”
“Are Baal’s other names Bribery and Blackmail?” glowered Edmonds.
“There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover. Yet it’s pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument.”
“As soon as we’ve made it strong enough,” supplied Edmonds.
“An instrument of what?” inquired Miss Van Arsdale.
“Power for himself. Political, I suppose.”
“Does he want office?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians. We’ve done it already in a few cases. That’s Edmonds’s specialty. I’ll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown. He and I are coming to a new basis of finance.”
“Yes; he thinks he can’t afford to keep on paying you by circulation. You’re putting on too much.” This from Edmonds.
“That’s what he got me here for. However, I don’t really believe he can. I’m eating up what should be the paper’s legitimate profits. And yet”—he smiled radiantly—“there are times when I don’t see how I’m going to get along with what I have. It’s pretty absurd, isn’t it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?”
“It’s a fairy-tale,” declared Miss Van Arsdale. “I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban. But this isn’t an arrival. It’s a triumph.”
“Say rather it’s a feat of balancing,” he propounded. “A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope. Failure on one side; debt on the other. Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling.”
“What is it making of him, Mr. Edmonds?” Banneker’s oldest friend turned her limpid and anxious regard upon his closest friend.
“A power. Oh, it’s real enough, all this empire of words that crumbles daily. It leaves something behind, a little residue of thought, ideals, convictions. What do you fear for him?”
“Cynicism,” she breathed uneasily.
“It’s the curse of the game. But it doesn’t get the worker who feels his work striking home.”
“Do you see any trace of cynicism in the paper?” asked Banneker curiously.
“All this blaring and glaring and froth and distortion,” she replied, sweeping her hand across the issue which lay on the desk before her. “Can you do that sort of thing and not become that sort of thing?”
“Ask Edmonds,” said Banneker.
“Thirty years I’ve been in this business,” said the veteran slowly. “I suppose there are few of its problems and perplexities that I haven’t been up against. And I tell you, Miss Van Arsdale, all this froth and noise and sensationalism doesn’t matter. It’s an offense to taste, I know. But back of it is the big thing that we’re trying to do; to enlist the ignorant and helpless and teach them to be less ignorant and helpless. If fostering the political ambitions of a Marrineal is part of the price, why, I’m willing to pay it, so long as the paper keeps straight and doesn’t sell itself for bribe money. After all, Marrineal can ride to his goal only on our chariot. The Patriot is an institution now. You can’t alter an institution, not essentially. You get committed to it, to the thing you’ve made yourself. Ban and I have made the new Patriot, not Marrineal. Even if he got rid of us, he couldn’t change the paper; not for a long time and only very gradually. The following that we’ve built up would be too strong for him.”
“Isn’t it too strong for you two?” asked the doubting woman-soul.
“No. We understand it because we made it.”
“Frankenstein once said something like that,” she murmured.
“It isn’t a monster,” rumbled Edmonds. “Sometimes I think it’s a toy dog, with Ban’s ribbon around its cute little neck. I’ll answer for Ban, Miss Van Arsdale.”
The smoke of his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down upon his unsuspecting worshipers.
But Banneker, moving purposefully amidst that vast phantasmagoria of pulsing print, wherein all was magnified, distorted, perverted to the claims of a gross and rabid public appetite, dreamed his pure, untainted dream; the conception of his newspaper as a voice potent enough to reach and move all; dominant enough to impose its underlying ideal; confident enough of righteousness to be free of all silencing and control. That voice should supply the long unsatisfied hunger of the many for truth uncorrupted. It should enunciate straightly, simply, without reservation, the daily verities destined to build up the eternal structure. It should be a religion of seven days a week, set forth by a thousand devoted preachers for a million faithful hearers.
Camilla Van Arsdale had partly read his dream, and could have wept for it and him.
Io Eyre had begun to read it, and her heart went out to him anew. For this was the test of success.
CHAPTER III
It was one of those mornings of coolness after cloying heat when even the crowded, reeking, frowzy metropolis wakes with a breath of freshness in its nostrils. Independent of sleep as ever, Banneker was up and footing it briskly for the station before eight o’clock, for Camilla Van Arsdale was returning to Manzanita, having been ordered back to her seclusion with medical science’s well-considered verdict wrapped up in tactful words to bear her company on the long journey. When she would be ordered on a longer journey by a mightier Authority, medical science forbore to specify; but in the higher interests of American music it was urgently pressed upon her that she be abstemious in diet, niggardly of work, careful about fatigue and excitement, and in general comport herself in such manner as to deprive the lease of life remaining to her of most of its savor and worth. She had told Ban that the physicians thought her condition favorable.
Invalidism was certainly not suggested in her erect bearing and serene face as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale’s common sense came to the rescue.
“Go away, my dear,” she said, with her understanding smile. “Don’t think that you’re obliged to cling to the dragging minutes. It’s an ungraceful posture.... Ban! What makes you look like that?”
“I thought—I heard—”
A clear voice outside said, “Then it must be this one.” There was a decisive tap on the door. “May I come in?”..."Come in,” responded Miss Van Arsdale. “Bring them here, porter,” directed the voice outside, and Io entered followed by an attendant almost hidden in a huge armful of such roses as are unpurchasable even in the most luxurious of stores.
“I’ve looted our conservatory,” said she. “Papa will slay me. They’ll last to Chicago.”
After an almost imperceptible hesitation she kissed the older woman. She gave her hand to Banneker. “I knew I should find you here.”
“Any other woman of my acquaintance would have said, ‘Who would have expected to find you here!’” commented Miss Van Arsdale.
“Yes? I suppose so. But we’ve never been on that footing, Ban and I.” Io’s tone was casual; almost careless.
“I thought that you were in the country,” said Banneker.
“So we are. I drove up this morning to bid Miss Van Arsdale bon voyage, and all the luck in the world. I suppose we three shall meet again one of these days.”
“You prophesy in the most matter-of-fact tone a gross improbability,” observed Miss Van Arsdale.
“Oh, our first meeting was the gross improbability,” retorted the girl lightly. “After that anything might be logical. Au revoir.”
“Go with her, Ban,” said Miss Camilla.
“It isn’t leaving time yet,” he protested. “There’s five whole minutes.”
“Yes; come with me, Ban,” said Io tranquilly.
Camilla Van Arsdale kissed his cheek, gave him a little, half-motherly pat, said, “Keep on making me proud of you,” in her even, confident tones, and pushed him out of the door.
Ban and Io walked down the long platform in a thoughtful silence which disconcerted neither of them. Io led the way out of it.
“At half-past four,” she stated, “I had a glass of milk and one cracker.”
“Where do you want to breakfast?”
“Thanking you humbly, sir, for your kind invitation, the nearer the better. Why not here?”
They found a table in the well-appointed railroad restaurant and ordered. Over her honey-dew melon Io asked musingly:
“What do you suppose she thinks of us?”
“Miss Camilla? What should she think?”
“What, indeed? What do we think, ourselves?”
“Has it any importance?” he asked gloomily.
“And that’s rather rude,” she chided. “Anything that I think should, by courtesy, be regarded as important.... Ban, how often have we seen each other?”
“Since I came to New York, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Nine times.”
“So many? And how much have we talked together? All told; in time, I mean.”
“Possibly a solid hour. Not more.”
“It hasn’t made any difference, has it? There’s been no interruption. We’ve never let the thread drop. We’ve never lost touch. Not really.”
“No. We’ve never lost touch.”
“You needn’t repeat it as if it were a matter for mourning and repentance. I think it rather wonderful.... Take our return from the train, all the way down without a word. Were you sulking, Ban?”
“No. You know I wasn’t.”
“Of course I know it. It was simply that we didn’t need to talk. There’s no one else in the world like that.... How long is it? Three years—four—more than four years.
We twain once well in sunder What will the mad gods do For hate with me, I wond—‘”
“My God, Io! Don’t!”
“Oh, Ban; I’m sorry! Have I hurt you? I was dreaming back into the old world.”
“And I’ve been trying all these years not to.”
“Is the reality really better? No; don’t answer that! I don’t want you to. Answer me something else. About Betty Raleigh.”
“What about her?”
“If I were a man I should find her an irresistible sort of person. Entirely aside from her art. Are you going to marry her, Ban?”
“No.”
“Tell me why not.”
“For one reason because she doesn’t want to marry me.”
“Have you asked her? It’s none of my business. But I don’t believe you have. Tell me this; would you have asked her, if it hadn’t been for—if Number Three had never been wrecked in the cut? You see the old railroad terms you taught me still cling. Would you?”
“How do I know? If the world hadn’t changed under my feet, and the sky over my head—”
“Is it so changed? Do the big things, the real things, ever change?... Don’t answer that, either. Ban, if I’ll go out of your life now, and stay out, honestly, will you marry Betty Raleigh and—and live happy ever after?”
“Would you want me to?”
“Yes. Truly. And I’d hate you both forever.”
“Betty Raleigh is going to marry some one else.”
“No! I thought—people said—Are you sorry, Ban?”
“Not for myself. I think he’s the wrong man for her.”
“Yes; that would be a change of the earth underfoot and the sky overhead, if one cared,” she mused. “And I said they didn’t change.”
“Don’t they!” retorted Banneker bitterly. “You are married.”
“I have been married,” she corrected, with an air of amiable rectification. “It was a wise thing to do. Everybody said so. It didn’t last. Nobody thought it would. I didn’t really think so myself.”
“Then why in Heaven’s name—”
“Oh, let’s not talk about it now. Some other time, perhaps. Say next time we meet; five or six months from now.... No; I won’t tease you any more, Ban. It won’t be that. It won’t be long. I’ll tell you the truth: I’d heard a lot about you and Betty Raleigh, and I got to know her and I hoped it would be a go. I did; truly, Ban. I owed you that chance of happiness. I took mine, you see; only it wasn’t happiness that I gambled for. Something else. Safety. The stakes are usually different for men and women. So now you know.... Well, if you don’t, you’ve grown stupid. And I don’t want to talk about it any more. I want to talk about—about The Patriot. I read it this morning while I was waiting; your editorial. Ban”—she drew a derisive mouth—“I was shocked.”
“What was it? Politics?” asked Banneker, who, turning out his editorials several at a time, seldom bothered to recall on what particular day any one was published. “You wouldn’t be expected to like our politics.”
“Not politics. It is about Harvey Wheelwright.”
Banneker was amused. “The immortally popular Wheelwright. We’re serializing his new novel, ‘Satiated with Sin,’ in the Sunday edition. My idea. It’ll put on circulation where we most need it.”
“Is that any reason why you should exploit him as if he were the foremost living novelist?”
“Certainly. Besides, he is, in popularity.”
“But, Ban; his stuff is awful! If this latest thing is like the earlier. [“Worse,” murmured Banneker.] And you’re writing about him as if he were—well, Conrad and Wells rolled into one.”
“He’s better than that, for the kind of people that read him. It’s addressed to them, that editorial. All the stress is on his piety, his popularity, his power to move men’s minds; there isn’t a word that even touches on the domain of art or literary skill.”
“It has that effect.”
“Ah! That’s my art,” chuckled Banneker. “That’s literary skill, if you choose!”
“Do you know what I call it? I call it treason.”
His mind flashed to meet hers. She read comprehension in his changed face and the shadow in her eyes, lambent and profound, deepened.
“Treason to the world that we two made for ourselves out there,” she pursued evenly.
“You shattered it.”
“To the Undying Voices.”
“You stilled them, for me.”
“Oh, Ban! Not that!” A sudden, little sob wrenched at her throat. She half thrust out a hand toward him, and withdrew it, to cup and hold her chin in the old, thoughtful posture that plucked at his heart with imperious memories. “Don’t they sing for you any more?” begged Io, wistful as a child forlorn for a dream of fairies dispelled.
“I wouldn’t let them. They all sang of you.”
She sighed, but about the tender corners of her lips crept the tremor of a smile. Instantly she became serious again.
“If you still heard the Voices, you could never have written that editorial.... What I hate about it is that it has charm; that it imparts charm to a—to a debasing thing.”
“Oh, come, Io!” protested the victim of this criticism, more easily. “Debasing? Why, Wheelwright is considered the most uplifting of all our literary morality-improvers.”
Io amplified and concluded her critique briefly and viciously. “A slug!”
“No; seriously. I’m not sure that he doesn’t inculcate a lot of good in his way. At least he’s always on the side of the angels.”
“What kind of angels? Tinsel seraphs with paint on their cheeks, playing rag-time harps out of tune! There’s a sickly slaver of sentiment over everything he touches that would make any virtue nauseous.”
“Don’t you want a job as a literary critic Our Special Reviewer, Miss Io Wel—Mrs. Delavan Eyre,” he concluded, in a tone from which the raillery had flattened out.
At that bald betrayal, Io’s color waned slightly. She lifted her water-glass and sipped at it. When she spoke again it was as if an inner scene had been shifted.
“What did you come to New York for?”
“Success.”
“As in all the fables. And you’ve found it. It was almost too easy, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed, not. It was touch and go.”
“Would you have come but for me?”
He stared at her, considering, wondering.
“Remember,” she adjured him; “success was my prescription. Be flattering for once. Let me think that I’m responsible for the miracle.”
“Perhaps. I couldn’t stay out there—afterward. The loneliness....”
“I didn’t want to leave you loneliness,” she burst out passionately under her breath. “I wanted to leave you memory and ambition and the determination to succeed.”
“For what?”
“Oh, no; no!” She answered the harsh thought subtending his query. “Not for myself. Not for any pride. I’m not cheap, Ban.”
“No; you’re not cheap.”
“I would have kept my distance.... It was quite true what I said to you about Betty Raleigh. It was not success alone that I wanted for you; I wanted happiness, too. I owed you that—after my mistake.”
He caught up the last word. “You’ve admitted to yourself, then, that it was a mistake?”
“I played the game,” she retorted. “One can’t always play right. But one can always play fair.”
“Yes; I know your creed of sportsmanship. There are worse religions.”
“Do you think I played fair with you, Ban? After that night on the river?”
He was mute.
“Do you know why I didn’t kiss you good-bye in the station? Not really kiss you, I mean, as I did on the island?”
“No.”
“Because, if I had, I should never have had the strength to go away.” She lifted her eyes to his. Her voice fell to a half whisper. “You understood, on the island?... What I meant?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t take me. I wonder. Ban, if it hadn’t been for the light flashing in our eyes and giving us hope...?”
“How can I tell? I was dazed with the amazement and the glory of it—of you. But—yes. My God, yes! And then? Afterward?”
“Could there have been any afterward?” she questioned dreamily. “Would we not just have waited for the river to sweep us up and carry us away? What other ending could there have been, so fitting?”
“Anyway,” he said with a sudden savage jealousy, “whatever happened you would not have gone away to marry Eyre.”
“Should I not? I’m by no means sure. You don’t understand much of me, my poor Ban.”
“How could you!” he burst out. “Would that have been—”
“Oh, I should have told him, of course. I’d have said, ‘Del, there’s been another man, a lover.’ One could say those things to him.”
“Would he have married you?”
“You wouldn’t, would you?” she smiled. “All or nothing, Ban, for you. About Del, I don’t know.” She shrugged dainty shoulders. “I shouldn’t have much cared.”
“And would you have come back to me, Io?”
“Do you want me to say ‘Yes’? You do want me to say’ Yes,’ don’t you, my dear? How can I tell?... Sooner or later, I suppose. Fate. The irresistible current. I am here now.”
“Io.” He leaned to her across the little table, his somber regard holding hers. “Why did you tell Camilla Van Arsdale that you would never divorce Eyre?”
“Because it’s true.”
“But why tell her? So that it should come back to me?”
She answered him straight and fearlessly. “Yes. I thought it would be easier for you to hear from her.”
“Did you?” He sat staring past her at visions. It was not within Banneker’s code, his sense of fair play in the game, to betray to Io his wonderment (shared by most of her own set) that she should have endured the affront of Del Eyre’s openly flagitious life, even though she had herself implied some knowledge of it in her assumption that a divorce could be procured. However, Io met his reticence with characteristic candor.
“Of course I know about Del. We have a perfect understanding. He’s agreed to maintain the outward decencies, from now on. I don’t consider that I’ve the right to ask more. You see, I shouldn’t have married him ... even though he understood that I wasn’t really in love with him. We’re friends; and we’re going to remain friends. Just that. Del’s a good sort,” she added with a hint of pleading the cause of a misunderstood person. “He’d give me my divorce in a minute; even though he still cares—in his way. But there’s his mother. She’s a sort of latter-day saint; one of those rare people that you respect and love in equal parts; the only other one I know is Cousin Willis Enderby. She’s an invalid, hopeless, and a Roman Catholic, and for me to divorce Del would poison the rest of her life. So I won’t. I can’t.”
“She won’t live forever,” muttered Banneker.
“No. Not long, perhaps.” There was pain and resolution in Io’s eyes as they were lifted to meet his again. “There’s another reason. I can’t tell even you, Ban. The secret isn’t mine.... I’m sorry.”
“Haven’t you any work to do to-day?” she asked after a pause, with a successful effect of lightness.
He roused himself, settled the check, and took her to her car, parked near by.
“Where do you go now?” he asked.
“Back to the country.”
“When shall I see you again?”
“I wonder,” said Io.