CHAPTER VI
Put to the direct question, as, for example, on the witness stand, Mr. Ely Ives would, before his connection with Tertius Marrineal, have probably identified himself as a press-agent. In that capacity he had acted, from time to time, for a railroad with many axes to grind, a widespread stock-gambling enterprise, a minor political ring, a liquor combination, and a millionaire widow from the West who innocently believed that publicity, as manipulated by Mr. Ives, could gain social prestige for her in the East.
In every phase of his employment, the ex-medical student had gathered curious and valuable lore. In fact he was one of those acquisitive persons who collect and hoard scandals, a miser of private and furtive information. His was the zeal of the born collector; something of the genius, too: he boasted a keen instinct. In his earlier and more precarious days he had formed the habit of watching for and collating all possible advices concerning those whom he worked for or worked against and branching from them to others along radiating lines of business, social, or family relationships. To him New York was a huge web, of sinister and promising design, dim, involved, too often impenetrable in the corners where the big spiders spin. He had two guiding maxims: “It may come in handy some day,” and “They’ll all bear watching.” Before the prosperous time, he had been, in his devotion to his guiding principles, a practitioner of the detective arts in some of their least savory phases; had haunted doorsteps, lurked upon corners, been rained upon, snowed upon, possibly spat upon, even arrested; all of which he accepted, mournful but uncomplaining. One cannot whole-heartedly serve an ideal and come off scatheless. He was adroit, well-spoken, smooth of surface, easy of purse, untiring, supple, and of an inexhaustible good-humor. It was from the ex-medical student that Marrineal had learned of Banneker’s offer from the Syndicate, also of his over-prodigal hand in money matters.
“He’s got to have the cash,” was the expert’s opinion upon Banneker. “There’s your hold on him.... Quit? No danger. New York’s in his blood. He’s in love with life, puppy-love; his clubs, his theater first-nights, his invitations to big houses which he seldom accepts, big people coming to his House with Three Eyes. And, of course, his sense of power in the paper. No; he won’t quit. How could he? He’ll compromise.”
“Do you figure him to be the compromising sort?” asked Marrineal doubtfully.
“He isn’t the journalistic Puritan that he lets on to be. Look at that Harvey Wheelwright editorial,” pointed out the acute Ives. “He don’t believe what he wrote about Wheelwright; just did it for his own purposes. Well, if the oracle can work himself for his own purposes, others can work him when the time comes, if it’s properly managed.”
Marrineal shook his head. “If there’s a weakness in him I haven’t found it.”
Ives put on a look of confidential assurance. “Be sure it’s there. Only it isn’t of the ordinary kind. Banneker is pretty big in his way. No,” he pursued thoughtfully; “it isn’t women, and it isn’t Wall Street, and it isn’t drink; it isn’t even money, in the usual sense. But it’s something. By the way, did I tell you that I’d found an acquaintance from the desert where Banneker hails from?”
“No.” Marrineal’s tone subtly indicated that he should have been told at once. That sort of thing was, indeed, the basis on which Ives drew a considerable stipend from his patron’s private purse, as “personal representative of Mr. Marrineal” for purposes unspecified.
“A railroad man. From what he tells me there was some sort of love-affair there. A girl who materialized from nowhere and spent two weeks, mostly with the romantic station-agent. Might have been a princess in exile, by my informant, who saw her twice. More likely some cheap little skate of a movie actress on a bust.”
“A station-agent’s taste in women friends—” began Marrineal, and forbore unnecessarily to finish.
“Possibly it has improved. Or—well, at any rate, there was something there. My railroad man thinks the affair drove Banneker out of his job. The fact of his being woman-proof here points to its having been serious.”
“There was a girl out there about that time visiting Camilla Van Arsdale,” remarked Marrineal carelessly; “a New York girl. One of the same general set. Miss Van Arsdale used to be a New Yorker and rather a distinguished one.”
Too much master of his devious craft to betray discomfiture over another’s superior knowledge of a subject which he had tried to make his own, Ely Ives remarked:
“Then she was probably the real thing. The princess on vacation. You don’t know who she was, I suppose,” he added tentatively.
Marrineal did not answer, thereby giving his factotum uncomfortably to reflect that he really must not expect payment for information and the information also.
“I guess he’ll bear watching.” Ives wound up with his favorite philosophy.
It was a few days after this that, by a special interposition of kindly chance, Ives, having returned from a trip out of town, saw Banneker and Io breakfasting in the station restaurant. To Marrineal he said nothing of this at the time; nor, indeed, to any one else. But later he took it to a very private market of his own, the breakfast-room of a sunny and secluded house far uptown, where lived, in an aroma of the domestic virtues, a benevolent-looking old gentleman who combined the attributes of the ferret, the leech, and the vulture in his capacity as editor of that famous weekly publication, The Searchlight. Ives did not sell in that mart; he traded for other information. This time he wanted something about Judge Willis Enderby, for he was far enough on the inside politically to see in him a looming figure which might stand in the way of certain projects, unannounced as yet, but tenderly nurtured in the ambitious breast of Tertius C. Marrineal. From the gently smiling patriarch he received as much of the unwritten records as that authority deemed it expedient to give him, together with an admonition, thrown in for good measure.
“Dangerous, my young friend! Dangerous!”
The passionate and patient collector thought it highly probable that Willis Enderby would be dangerous game. Certainly he did not intend to hunt in those fields, unless he could contrive a weapon of overwhelming caliber.
Ely Ives’s analysis of Banneker’s situation was in a measure responsible for Marrineal’s proposition of the new deal to his editor.
“He has accepted it,” the owner told his purveyor of information. “But the real fight is to come.”
“Over the policy of the editorial page,” opined Ives.
“Yes. This is only a truce.”
As a truce Banneker also regarded it. He had no desire to break it. Nor, after it was established, did Marrineal make any overt attempt to interfere with his conduct of his column.
After awaiting gage of battle from his employer, in vain, Banneker decided to leave the issue to chance. Surely he was not surrendering any principle, since he continued to write as he chose upon whatever topics he selected. Time enough to fight when there should be urged upon him either one of the cardinal sins of journalism, the suppressio veri or the suggestio falsi, which he had more than once excoriated in other papers, to the pious horror of the hush-birds of the craft who had chattered and cheeped accusations of “fouling one’s own nest.”
Opportunity was not lacking to Marrineal for objections to a policy which made powerful enemies for the paper; Banneker, once assured of his following, had hit out right and left. From being a weak-kneed and rather apologetic defender of the “common people,” The Patriot had become, logically, under Banneker’s vigorous and outspoken policy, a proponent of the side of labor against capital. It had hotly supported two important and righteous local strikes and been the chief agent in winning one. With equal fervor it had advocated a third strike whose justice was at best dubious and had made itself anathema, though the strike was lost, to an industrial group which was honestly striving to live up to honorable standards. It had offended a powerful ring of bankers and for a time embarrassed Marrineal in his loans. It had threatened editorial reprisals upon a combination of those feared and arrogant advertisers, the department stores, for endeavoring, with signal lack of success, to procure the suppression of certain market news. It became known as independent, honest, unafraid, radical (in Wall Street circles “socialistic” or even “anarchistic”), and, to the profession, as dangerous to provoke. Advertisers were, from time to time, alienated; public men, often of The Patriot’s own trend of thought, opposed. Commercial associations even passed resolutions, until Banneker took to publishing them with such comment as seemed to him good and appropriate. Marrineal uttered no protest, though the unlucky Haring beat his elegantly waistcoated breast and uttered profane if subdued threats of resigning, which were for effect only; for The Patriot’s circulation continued to grow and the fact to which every advertising expert clings as to the one solid hope in a vaporous calling, is that advertising follows circulation.
Seldom did Banneker see his employer in the office, but Marrineal often came to the Saturday nights of The House With Three Eyes, which had already attained the fame of a local institution. As the numbers drawn to it increased, it closed its welcoming orbs earlier and earlier, and, once they were darkened, there was admittance only for the chosen few.
It was a first Saturday in October, New York’s homing month for its indigenous social birds and butterflies, when The House triply blinked itself into darkness at the untimely hour of eleven-forty-five. There was the usual heterogeneous crowd there, alike in one particular alone, that every guest represented, if not necessarily distinction, at least achievement in his own line. Judge Willis Enderby, many times invited, had for the first time come. At five minutes after midnight, the incorruptible doorkeeper sent an urgent message requesting Mr. Banneker’s personal attention to a party who declined politely but firmly to be turned away. The host, answering the summons, found Io. She held out both hands to him.
“Say you’re glad to see me,” she said imperatively.
“Light up the three eyes,” Banneker ordered the doorman. “Are you answered?” he said to Io.
“Ah, that’s very pretty,” she approved. “It means ‘welcome,’ doesn’t it?”
“Welcome,” he assented.
“Then Herbert and Esther can come in, can’t they? They’re waiting in the car for me to be rejected in disgrace. They’ve even bet on it.”
“They lose,” answered Banneker with finality.
“And you forgive me for cajoling your big, black Cerberus, because it’s my first visit this year, and if I’m not nicely treated I’ll never come again.”
“Your welcome includes full amnesty.”
“Then if you’ll let me have one of my hands back—it doesn’t matter which one, really—I’ll signal the others to come in.”
Which, accordingly, she did. Banneker greeted Esther Forbes and Cressey, and waited for the trio until they came down. There was a stir as they entered. There was usually a stir in any room which Io entered. She had that quality of sending waves across the most placid of social pools. Willis Enderby was one of the first to greet her, a quick irradiation of pleasure relieving the austere beauty of his face.
“I thought the castle was closed,” he wondered. “How did you cross the inviolable barriers?”
“I had the magic password,” smiled Io.
“Youth? Beauty? Or just audacity?”
“Your Honor is pleased to flatter,” she returned, drooping her eyes at him with a purposefully artificial effect. From the time when she was a child of four she had carried on a violent and highly appreciated flirtation with “Cousin Billy,” being the only person in the world who employed the diminutive of his name.
“You knew Banneker before? But, of course. Everybody knows Banneker.”
“It’s quite wonderful, isn’t it! He never makes an effort, I’m told. People just come to him. Where did you meet him?”
Enderby told her. “We’re allies, in a way. Though sometimes he is against us. He’s doing yeoman work in this reform mayoralty campaign. If we elect Robert Laird, as I think we shall, it will be chiefly due to The Patriot’s editorials.”
“Then you have confidence in Mr. Banneker?” she asked quickly.
“Well—in a way, I have,” he returned hesitantly.
“But with reservations,” she interpreted. “What are they?”
“One, only, but a big one. The Patriot itself. You see, Io, The Patriot is another matter.”
“Why is it another matter?”
“Well, there’s Marrineal, for example.”
“I don’t know Mr. Marrineal. Evidently you don’t trust him.”
“I trust nobody,” disclosed the lawyer, a little sternly, “who is represented by what The Patriot is and does, whether it be Marrineal, Banneker, or another.” His glance, wandering about the room, fell on Russell Edmonds, seated in a corner talking with the Great Gaines. “Unless it be Edmonds over there,” he qualified. “All his life he has fought me as a corporation lawyer; yet I have the queer feeling that I could trust the inmost secret of my life to his honor. Probably I’m an old fool, eh?”
Io devoted a moment’s study to the lined and worn face of the veteran. “No. I think you’re right,” she pronounced.
“In any case, he isn’t responsible for The Patriot. He can’t help it.”
“Don’t be so cryptic, Cousin Billy. Can’t help what? What is wrong with the paper?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“But I want to understand,” said imperious Io.
“As a basis to understanding, you’d have to read the paper.”
“I have. Everyday. All of it.”
He gave her a quick, reckoning look which she sustained with a slight deepening of color. “The advertisements, too?” She nodded. “What do you think of them?”
“Some of them are too disgusting to discuss.”
“Did it occur to you to compare them with the lofty standards of our young friend’s editorials?”
“What has he to do with the advertisements?” she countered.
“Assume, for the sake of the argument, that he has nothing to do with them. You may have noticed a recent editorial against race-track gambling, with the suicide of a young bank messenger who had robbed his employer to pay his losses as text.”
“Well? Surely that kind of editorial makes for good.”
“Being counsel for that bank, I happen to know the circumstances of the suicide. The boy had pinned his faith to one of the race-track tipsters who advertise in The Patriot to furnish a list of sure winners for so much a week.”
“Do you suppose that Mr. Banneker knew that?”
“Probably not. But he knows that his paper takes money for publishing those vicious advertisements.”
“Suppose he couldn’t help it?”
“Probably he can’t.”
“Well, what would you have him do? Stop writing the editorials? I think it is evidence of his courage that he should dare to attack the evils which his own paper fosters.”
“That’s one view of it, certainly,” replied Enderby dryly. “A convenient view. But there are other details. Banneker is an ardent advocate of abstinence, ‘Down with the Demon Rum!’ The columns of The Patriot reek with whiskey ads. The same with tobacco.”
“But, Cousin Billy, you don’t believe that a newspaper should shut out liquor and tobacco advertisements, do you?”
The lawyer smiled patiently. “Come back on the track, Io,” he invited. “That isn’t the point. If a newspaper preaches the harm in these habits, it shouldn’t accept money for exploiting them. Look further. What of the loan-shark offers, and the blue-sky stock propositions, and the damnable promises of the consumption and cancer quacks? You can’t turn a page of The Patriot without stumbling on them. There’s a smell of death about that money.”
“Don’t all the newspapers publish the same kind of advertisements?” argued the girl.
“Certainly not. Some won’t publish an advertisement without being satisfied of its good faith. Others discriminate less carefully. But there are few as bad as The Patriot.”
“If Mr. Banneker were your client, would you advise him to resign?” she asked shrewdly.
Enderby winced and chuckled simultaneously. “Probably not. It is doubtful whether he could find another rostrum of equal influence. And his influence is mainly for good. But since you seem to be interested in newspapers, Io”—he gave her another of his keen glances—“from The Patriot you can make a diagnosis of the disease from which modern journalism is suffering. A deep-seated, pervasive insincerity. At its worst, it is open, shameless hypocrisy. The public feels it, but is too lacking in analytical sense to comprehend it. Hence the unformulated, instinctive, universal distrust of the press. ‘I never believe anything I read in the papers.’ Of course, that is both false and silly. But the feeling is there; and it has to be reckoned with one day. From this arises an injustice, that the few papers which are really upright, honest, and faithful to their own standards, are tainted in the public mind with the double-dealing of the others. Such as The Patriot.”
“You use The Patriot for your purposes,” Io pointed out.
“When it stands for what I believe right. I only wish I could trust it.”
“Then you really feel that you can’t trust Mr. Banneker?”
“Ah; we’re back to that!” thought Enderby with uneasiness. Aloud he said: “It’s a very pretty problem whether a writer who shares the profits of a hypocritical and dishonest policy can maintain his own professional independence and virtue. I gravely doubt it.”
“I don’t,” said Io, and there was pride in her avowal.
“My dear,” said the Judge gravely, “what does it all mean? Are you letting yourself become interested in Errol Banneker?”
Io raised clear and steady eyes to the concerned regard of her old friend. “If I ever marry again, I shall marry him.”
“You’re not going to divorce poor Delavan?” asked the other quickly.
“No. I shall play the game through,” was the quiet reply.
For a space Willis Enderby sat thinking. “Does Banneker know your—your intentions?”
“No.”
“You mustn’t let him, Io.”
“He won’t know the intention. He may know the—the feeling back of it.” A slow and glorious flush rose in her face, making her eyes starry. “I don’t know that I can keep it from him, Cousin Billy. I don’t even know that I want to. I’m an honest sort of idiot, you know.”
“God grant that he may prove as honest!” he half whispered.
Presently Banneker, bearing a glass of champagne and some pâté sandwiches for Io, supplanted the lawyer.
“Are you the devotee of toil that common report believes, Ban?” she asked him lazily. “They say that you write editorials with one hand and welcome your guests with the other.”
“Not quite that,” he answered. “To-night I’m not thinking of work. I’m not thinking of anything but you. It’s very wonderful, your being here.”
“But I want you to think of work. I want to see you in the very act. Won’t you write an editorial for me?”
He shook his head. “This late? That would be cruelty to my secretary.”
“I’ll take it down for you. I’m fairly fast on the typewriter.”
“Will you give me the subject, too?”
“No more than fair,” she admitted. “What shall it be? It ought to be something with memories in it. Books? Poetry?” she groped. “I’ve got it! Your oldest, favorite book. Have you forgotten?”
“The Sears-Roebuck catalogue? I get a copy every season, to renew the old thrill.”
“What a romanticist you are!” said she softly. “Couldn’t you write an editorial about it?”
“Couldn’t I? Try me. Come up to the den.”
He led the way to the remote austerities of the work-room. From a shelf he took down the fat, ornate pamphlet, now much increased in bulk over its prototype of the earlier years. With random finger he parted the leaves, here, there, again and still again, seeking auguries.
“Ready?” he said. “Now, I shut my eyes—and we’re in the shack again—the clean air of desert spaces—the click of the transmitter in the office that I won’t answer, being more importantly engaged—the faint fragrance of you permeating everything—youth—the unknown splendor of life—Now! Go!”
Of that editorial, composed upon the unpromising theme of mail-order merchandising, the Great Gaines afterward said that it was a kaleidoscopic panorama set moving to the harmonic undertones of a song of winds and waters, of passion and the inner meanings of life, as if Shelley had rhapsodized a catalogue into poetic being and glorious significance. He said it was foolish to edit a magazine when one couldn’t trust a cheap newspaper not to come flaming forth into literature which turned one’s most conscientious and aspiring efforts into tinsel. He also said “Damn!”
Io Welland (for it was Io Welland and not Io Eyre whom the soothsayer saw before him as he declaimed), instrument and inspiration of the achievement, said no word of direct praise. But as she wrote, her fingers felt as if they were dripping electric sparks. When, at the close, he asked, quite humbly, “Is that what you wanted?” she caught her breath on something like a sob.
“I’ll give you a title,” she said, recovering herself. “Call it ‘If there were Dreams to Sell.’”
“Ah, that’s good!” he cried. “My readers won’t get it. Pinheads! They get nothing that isn’t plain as the nose on their silly faces. Never mind. It’s good for ’em to be puzzled once in a while. Teaches ’em their place.... I’ll tell you who will understand it, though,” he continued, and laughed queerly.
“All the people who really matter will.”
“Some who matter a lot to The Patriot will. The local merchants who advertise with us. They’ll be wild.”
“Why?”
“They hate the mail-order houses with a deadly fear, because the cataloguers undersell them in a lot of lines. Won’t Rome howl the day after this appears!”
“Tell me about the relation between advertising and policy, Ban,” invited Io, and summarized Willis Enderby’s views.
Banneker had formulated for his own use and comfort the fallacy which has since become standard for all journalists unwilling or unable to face the issue of their own responsibility to the public. He now gave it forth confidently.
“A newspaper, Io, is like a billboard. Any one has a right to hire it for purposes of exploiting and selling whatever he has to sell. In accepting the advertisement, provided it is legal and decent, the publisher accepts no more responsibility than the owner of the land on which a billboard stands. Advertising space is a free forum.”
“But when it affects the editorial attitude—”
“That’s the test,” he put in quickly. “That’s why I’m glad to print this editorial of ours. It’s a declaration of independence.”
“Yes,” she acquiesced eagerly.
“If ever I use the power of my editorials for any cause that I don’t believe in—yes, or for my own advantage or the advantage of my employer—that will be the beginning of surrender. But as long as I keep a free pen and speak as I believe for what I hold as right and against what I hold as wrong, I can afford to leave the advertising policy to those who control it. It isn’t my responsibility.... It’s an omen, Io; I was waiting for it. Marrineal and I are at a deadlock on the question of my control of the editorial page. This ought to furnish a fighting issue. I’m glad it came from you.”
“Oh, but if it’s going to make trouble for you, I shall be sorry. And I was going to propose that we write one every Saturday.”
“Io!” he cried. “Does that mean—”
“It means that I shall become a regular attendant at Mr. Errol Banneker’s famous Saturday nights. Don’t ask me what more it means.” She rose and delivered the typed sheets into his hands. “I—I don’t know, myself. Take me back to the others, Ban.”
To Banneker, wakened next morning to a life of new vigor and sweetness, the outcome of the mail-order editorial was worth not one troubled thought. All his mind was centered on Io.
CHAPTER VII
Explosions of a powerful and resonant nature followed the publication of the fantastic, imaginative, and delightful mail-order catalogue editorial. In none of these senses, except the first, did it appeal to the advertising managers of the various department stores. They looked upon it as an outrage, an affront, a deliberate slap in the face for an established, vested, and prodigal support of the newspaper press. What the devil did The Patriot mean by it; The Patriot which sorely needed just their class of reputable patronage, and, after sundry contortions of rate-cutting, truckling, and offers of news items to back the advertising, was beginning to get it? They asked themselves, and, failing of any satisfactory answer, they asked The Patriot in no uncertain terms. Receiving vague and pained replies, they even went to the length of holding a meeting and sending a committee to wait upon the desperate Haring, passing over the advertising manager who was a mere figurehead in The Patriot office.
Then began one of those scenes of bullying and browbeating to which every newspaper, not at once powerful and honest enough to command the fear and respect of its advertisers, is at some time subjected. Haring, the victim personifying the offending organ, was stretched upon the rack and put to the question. What explanation had he to offer of The Patriot’s breach of faith?
He had none, had the miserable business manager. No one could regret it more than he. But, really, gentlemen, to call it a breach of faith—
What else was it? Wasn’t the paper turning on its own advertisers?
Well; in a sense. But not—
But nothing! Wasn’t it trying to undermine their legitimate business?
Not intentionally, Mr. Haring was (piteously) sure.
Intentionally be damned! Did he expect to carry their advertising on one page and ruin their business on another? Did he think they were putting money into The Patriot—a doubtful medium for their business, at best—to cut their own throats? They’d put it to him reasonably, now; who, after all, paid for the getting out of The Patriot? Wasn’t it the advertisers?
Certainly, certainly, gentlemen. Granted.
Could the paper run a month, a fortnight, a week without advertising?
No; no! It couldn’t. No newspaper could.
Then if the advertisers paid the paper’s way, weren’t they entitled to some say about it? Didn’t it have a right to give ’em at least a fair show?
Indeed, gentlemen, if he, Haring, were in control of the paper—
Then, why; why the hell was a cub of an editor allowed to cut loose and jump their game that way? They could find other places to spend their money; yes, and get a better return for it. They’d see The Patriot, and so on, and so forth.
Mr. Haring understood their feelings, sympathized, even shared them. Unfortunately the editorial page was quite out of his province.
Whose province was it, then? Mr. Banneker’s, eh? And to whom was Mr. Banneker responsible? Mr. Marrineal, alone? All right! They would see Mr. Marrineal.
Mr. Haring was sorry, but Mr. Marrineal was out of town. (Fiction.)
Well, in that case, Banneker. They’d trust themselves to show him which foot he got off on. They’d teach (two of them, in their stress of emotion, said “learn”; they were performing this in chorus) Banneker—
Oh, Mr. Banneker wasn’t there, either. (Haring, very terrified, and having built up an early conception of the Wild West Banneker from the clean-up of the dock gang, beheld in his imagination dejected members of the committee issuing piecemeal from the doors and windows of the editorial office, the process being followed by an even more regrettable exodus of advertising from the pages of The Patriot.)
Striving to be at once explanatory and propitiatory to all and sundry, Haring was reduced to inarticulate, choking interjections and paralytic motions of the hands, when a member of the delegation, hitherto silent, spoke up.
He was the representative of McLean & Swazey, a college graduate of a type then new, though now much commoner, in the developing profession of advertising. He had read the peccant editorial with a genuine relish of its charm and skill, and had justly estimated it for what it was, an intellectual jeu d’esprit, the expression of a passing fancy for a tempting subject, not of a policy to be further pursued.
“Enough has been said, I think, to define our position,” said he. “All that we need is some assurance that Mr. Banneker’s wit and skill will not be turned again to the profit of our competitors who, by the way, do not advertise in The Patriot.”
Haring eagerly gave the assurance. He would have given assurance of Banneker’s head on a salver to be rid of these persecuting autocrats. They withdrew, leaving behind an atmosphere of threat and disaster, dark, inglorious clouds of which Haring trailed behind him when he entered the office of the owner with his countenance of woe. His postulate was that Mr. Marrineal should go to his marplot editor and duly to him lay down the law; no more offending of the valuable department-store advertisers. No; nor of any others. Or he, Haring (greatly daring), would do it himself.
Beside the sweating and agonizing business manager, Marrineal looked very cool and tolerant and mildly amused.
“If you did that, Mr. Haring, do you appreciate what the result would be? We should have another editorial worse than the first, as soon as Mr. Banneker could think it out. No; you leave this to me. I’ll manage it.”
His management took the negative form of a profound silence upon the explicit point. But on the following morning Banneker found upon his desk a complete analytical table showing the advertising revenue of the paper by classes, with a star over the department-store list, indicating a dated withdrawal of twenty-two thousand dollars a year. The date was of that day. Thus was Banneker enabled to figure out, by a simple process, the loss to himself of any class of advertising, or even small group in a class, dropping out of the paper. It was clever of Marrineal, he admitted to himself, and, in a way, disappointing. His proffered gage of battle had been refused, almost ignored. The issue was not to be joined when he was ready, but when Marrineal was ready, and on Marrineal’s own ground. Very well, Banneker could be a good waiter. Meantime he had at least asserted his independence.
Io called him up by ‘phone, avid of news of the editorial, and he was permitted to take her to luncheon and tell her all about it. In her opinion he had won a victory; established a position. Banneker was far less sanguine; he had come to entertain a considerable respect for Marrineal’s capacity. And he had another and more immediate complication on his mind, which fact his companion, by some occult exercise of divination, perceived.
“What else is worrying you, Ban?” she asked.
Banneker did not want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about Io, about themselves. He said so. She shook her head.
“Tell me about the paper.”
“Oh, just the usual complications. There’s nothing to interest you in them.”
“Everything,” she maintained ardently.
Banneker caught his breath. Had she given him her lips, it could hardly have meant more—perhaps not meant so much as this tranquil assumption of her right to share in the major concerns of his life.
“If you’ve been reading the paper,” he began, and waited for her silent nod before going on, “you know our attitude toward organized labor.”
“Yes. You are for it when it is right and not always against it when it is wrong.”
“One can’t split hairs in a matter of editorial policy. I’ve made The Patriot practically the mouthpiece of labor in this city; much more so than the official organ, which has no influence and a small following. Just now I’m specially anxious to hold them in line for the mayoralty campaign. We’ve got to elect Robert Laird. Otherwise we’ll have such an orgy of graft and rottenness as the city has never seen.”
“Isn’t the labor element for Laird?”
“It isn’t against him, except that he is naturally regarded as a silk-stocking. The difficulty isn’t politics. There’s some new influence in local labor circles that is working against me; against The Patriot. I think it’s a fellow named McClintick, a new man from the West.”
“Perhaps he wants to be bought off.”
“You’re thinking of the old style of labor leader,” returned Banneker. “It isn’t as simple as that. No; from what I hear, he’s a fanatic. And he has great influence.”
“Get hold of him and talk it out with him,” advised Io.
“I intend to.” He brooded for a moment. “There isn’t a man in New York,” he said fretfully, “that has stood for the interests of the masses and against the power of money as I have. Why, Io, before we cut loose in The Patriot, a banker or a railroad president was sacrosanct. His words were received with awe. Wall Street was the holy of holies, not to be profaned by the slightest hint of impiety. Well, we’ve changed all that! Not I, alone. Our cartoons have done more than the editorials. Every other paper in town has had to follow our lead. Even The Ledger.”
“I like The Ledger,” declared Io.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It has a sort of dignity; the dignity of self-respect.”
“Hasn’t The Patriot?” demanded the jealous Banneker.
“Not a bit,” she answered frankly, “except for your editorials. They have the dignity of good workmanship, and honesty, and courage, even when you’re wrong.”
“Are we so often wrong, Io?” he said wistfully.
“Dear boy, you can’t expect a girl, brought up as I have been, to believe that society is upside down, and would be better if it were tipped over the other way and run by a lot of hod-carriers and ditch-diggers and cooks. Can you, now?”
“Of course not. Nor is that what I advocate. I’m for the under dog. For fair play. So are you, aren’t you? I saw your name on the Committee List of the Consumers’ League, dealing with conditions in the department stores.”
“That’s different,” she said. “Those girls haven’t a chance in some of the shops. They’re brutalized. The stores don’t even pretend to obey the laws. We are trying to work out some sort of organization, now, for them.”
“Yet you’re hostile to organized labor! Who shall ever understand the feminine mind! Some day you’ll be coming to us for help.”
“Very likely. It must be a curious sensation, Ban, to have the consciousness of the power that you wield, and to be responsible to nobody on earth.”
“To the public that reads us,” he corrected.
“Not a real responsibility. There is no authority over you; no appeal from your judgments. Hasn’t that something to do with people’s dislike and distrust of the newspapers; the sense that so much irresponsible power is wrong?”
“Yet,” he said, “any kind of censorship is worse than the evil it remedies. I’ve never shown you my creed, have I?”
His manner was half jocular; there was a smile on his lips, but his eyes seemed to look beyond the petty troubles and problems of his craft to a final and firm verity.
“Tell me,” she bade him.
He drew his watch out and opened the back. For a moment she thought, with confused emotions, that she would see there a picture of herself of which he might have possessed himself somewhere. She closed her eyes momentarily against the fear of that anti-climax. When she opened them, it was to read, in a clear, fine print those high and sure words of Milton’s noblest message:
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
Twice she read the pregnant message.
“I have it,” said she gravely. “To keep—for always.”
“Some day I’ll put it at the head of The Patriot.”
“Why not now?”
“Not ready. I want to be surer; absolutely sure.”
“I’m sure,” she declared superbly; “of you.”
“You make me sure of myself, Io. But there’s Marrineal.”
“Yes; there’s Marrineal. You must have a paper of your own, mustn’t you, Ban, eventually?”
“Perhaps. If I ever get enough money to own it absolutely.”
“Only four years ago,” she murmured, with apparent irrelevancy. “And now—”
“When shall I see you again?” he asked anxiously as she rose. “Are you coming Saturday night?”
“Of course,” said Io.
Through the agency of Russell Edmonds, McClintick, the labor leader, came to see Banneker. He was a stooping giant with a deep, melancholy voice, and his attitude toward The Patriot was one of distrustful reticence. Genuine ardor has, however, a warming influence. McClintick’s silence melted by degrees, not into confidence but, surprisingly, into indignation, directed upon all the “capitalistic press” in general, but in particular against The Patriot. Why single out The Patriot, specially, Banneker asked.
“Hypocrite,” muttered the giant.
At length the reason came out, under pressure: The Patriot had been (in the words of the labor man) making a big row over the arrest of certain labor organizers, in one of the recurrent outbreaks against the Steel Trust, opposed by that organization’s systematic and tyrannous method of oppression. So far, so good. But why hadn’t the paper said a word about the murder of strikers’ wives and children out at the Veridian Lumber Company’s mills in Oregon; an outrage far surpassing anything ever laid to the account of the Steel Trust? Simple reason, answered Banneker; there had been no news of it over the wires. No; of course there hadn’t. The Amalgamated Wire Association (another tool of capitalism) had suppressed it; wouldn’t let any strike stuff get on the wires that it could keep off. Then how, asked Banneker, could it be expected—? McClintick interrupted in his voice of controlled passion; had Mr. Banneker ever heard of the Chicago Transcript (naming the leading morning paper); had he ever read it? Well, The Transcript—which, he, McClintick, hated strongly as an organ of money—nevertheless did honestly gather and publish news, as he was constrained huskily to admit. It had the Veridian story; was still running it from time to time. Therefore, if Mr. Banneker was interested, on behalf of The Patriot—
Certainly, The Patriot was interested; would obtain and publish the story in full, if it was as Mr. McClintick represented, with due editorial comment.
“Will it?” grumbled McClintick, gave his hat a look of mingled hope and skepticism, put it on, and went away.
“Now, what’s wrong with that chap’s mental digestion?” Banneker inquired of Edmonds, who had sat quiet throughout the interview. “What is he holding back?”
“Plenty,” returned the veteran in a tone which might have served for echo of the labor man’s gloom.
“Do you know the Veridian story?”
“Yes. I’ve just checked it up.”
“What’s the milk in that cocoanut?”
“Sour!” said Edmonds with such energy that Banneker turned to look at him direct. “The principal owner of Veridian is named Marrineal.... Where you going, Ban?”
“To see the principal owner of the name,” said Banneker grimly.
The quest took him to the big house on upper Fifth Avenue. Marrineal heard his editorial writer with impassive face.
“So the story has got here,” he remarked.
“Yes. Do you own Veridian?”
“No.”
Hope rose within Banneker. “You don’t?”
“My mother does. She’s in Europe. A rather innocent old person. The innocence of age, perhaps. Quite old.” All of this in a perfectly tranquil voice.
“Have you seen The Chicago Transcript? It’s an ugly story.”
“Very. I’ve sent a man out to the camp. There won’t be any more shootings.”
“It comes rather late. I’ve told McClintick, the labor man who comes from Wyoming, that we’ll carry the story, if we verify it.”
Marrineal raised his eyes slowly to Banneker’s stern face. “Have you?” he said coolly. “Now, as to the mayoralty campaign; what do you think of running a page feature of Laird’s reforms, as President of the Board, tracing each one down to its effect and showing what any backward step would mean? By the way, Laird is going to be pretty heavily obligated to The Patriot if he’s elected.”
For half an hour they talked politics, nothing else.
At the office Edmonds was making a dossier of the Veridian reports. It was ready when Banneker returned.
“Let it wait,” said Banneker.
Prudence ordained that he should throw the troublous stuff into the waste-basket. He wondered if he was becoming prudent, as another man might wonder whether he was becoming old. At any rate, he would make no decision until he had talked it over with Io. Not only did he feel instinctive confidence in her sense of fair play; but also this relationship of interest in his affairs, established by her, was the opportunity of his closest approach; an intimacy of spirit assured and subtle. He hoped that she would come early on Saturday evening.
But she did not. Some dinner party had claimed her, and it was after eleven when she arrived with Archie Densmore. At once Banneker took her aside and laid before her the whole matter.
“Poor Ban!” she said softly. “It isn’t so simple, having power to play with, is it?”
“But how am I to handle this?”
“The mills belong to Mr. Marrineal’s mother, you said?”
“Practically they do.”
“And she is—?”
“A silly and vain old fool.”
“Is that his opinion of her?”
“Necessarily. But he’s fond of her.”
“Will he really try to remedy conditions, do you think?”
“Oh, yes. So far as that goes.”
“Then I’d drop it.”
“Print nothing at all?”
“Not a word.”
“That isn’t what I expected from you. Why do you advise it?”
“Loyalty.”
“The paralytic virtue,” said Banneker with such bitterness of conviction that Io answered:
“I suppose you don’t mean that to be simply clever.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“There’s a measure of truth in it. But, Ban, you can’t use Mr. Marrineal’s own paper to expose conditions in Mr. Marrineal’s mother’s mills. If he’d even directed you to hold off—”
“That’s his infernal cleverness. I’d have told him to go to the devil.”
“And resigned?”
“Of course.”
“You can resign now,” she pointed out. “But I think you’d be foolish. You can do such big things. You are doing such big things with The Patriot. Cousin Billy Enderby says that if Laird is elected it will be your doing. Where else could you find such opportunity?”
“Tell me this, Io,” he said, after a moment of heavy-browed brooding very unlike his usual blithe certainty of bearing. “Suppose that lumber property were my own, and this thing had broken out.”
“Oh, I’d say to print it, every word,” she answered promptly. “Or”—she spoke very slowly and with a tremor of color flickering in her cheeks—“if it were mine, I’d tell you to print it.”
He looked up with a transfigured face. His hand fell on hers, in the covert of the little shelter of plants behind which they sat. “Do you realize what that implies?” he questioned.
“Perfectly,” she answered in her clear undertone.
He bent over to her hand, which turned, soft palm up, to meet his lips. She whispered a warning and he raised his head quickly. Ely Ives had passed near by.
“Marrineal’s familiar,” said Banneker. “I wonder how he got here. Certainly I didn’t ask him.... Very well, Io. I’ll compromise. But ... I don’t think I’ll put that quotation from the Areopagitica at the head of my column. That will have to wait. Perhaps it will have to wait until I—we get a paper of our own.”
“Poor Ban!” whispered Io.