A few minutes after leaving Marian that last night at Mrs. Carnarvon’s, Howard was deep in a mood of self-contempt. He felt that he had faced the crisis like a coward. He despised the weakness which enfeebled him for effort to win her and at the same time made it impossible for him to thrust her from his mind.
In the working hours his will conquered with the aid of fixed habit and he was able to concentrate upon his editorials. But in his rooms, and especially after the lights were out, his imagination became master, deprived him of sleep and occasionally lifted him to a height of hope in order that it might dash him down the more cruelly upon the rocks of fact.
At last he was forced to face the situation—in his own evasive fashion. It was impossible to go back. That loneliness which often threatened him after Alice’s death had become the permanent condition of his life. “I will work for her,” he said. “Until I have made a place for her I dare not claim her. So much I will concede to my weakness. But when I have won a position which reasonably assures the future, I shall claim her—no matter what has happened in the meanwhile.”
He would have smiled at this wild resolution had he been in a less distracted state of mind or had he been dealing with any other than a matter of love. But in the circumstances it gave him heart and set him to work with an energy and effectiveness which still further increased Mr. Malcolm’s esteem for him.
“Will you dine with me at the Union Club on Wednesday?” Mr. Malcolm asked one morning in mid-February. “Mr. Coulter and Mr. Stokely are coming. I want you to know them better.”
Howard accepted and wondered that he took so little interest. For Stokely and Coulter were the principal stockholders of the News-Record, and with Malcolm formed the triumvirate which directed it in all its departments. Mr. Malcolm held only a few shares of stock, but received what was in the newspaper-world an immense salary—thirty thousand a year. He was at once an able editor and an able diplomatist. He knew how to make the plans of his two associates conform to conditions of news and policy—when to let them use the paper, or, rather, when to use the paper himself for their personal interests; when and how to induce them to let the paper alone. Through a quarter of a century of changing ownerships Malcolm had persisted, chiefly because he had but one conviction—that the post of editor of the News-Record exactly suited him and must remain his at any sacrifice of personal character.
Howard had met Stokely and Coulter. He liked Stokely who was owner of a few shares more than one-third; he disliked Coulter who owned just under one-half.
Stokely was a frank, coarse, dollar-hunter, cheerfully unscrupulous in a large way, acute, caring not at all for principles of any kind, letting the paper alone most of the time because he was astute enough to know that in his ignorance of journalism he would surely injure it as a property.
Coulter was a hypocrite and a snob. Also he fancied he knew how to conduct a newspaper. He was as unscrupulous as Stokely but tried to mask it.
When Stokely wished the News-Record to advocate a “job,” or steal, or the election of some disreputable who would work in his interest, he told Malcolm precisely what he wanted and left the details of the stultification to his experienced adroitness. When Coulter wished to “poison the fountain of publicity,” as Malcolm called the paper’s departures from honesty and right, he approached the subject by stealth, trying to convince Malcolm that the wrong was not really wrong, but was right unfortunately disguised.
He would take Malcolm into his confidence by slow and roundabout steps, thus multiplying his difficulties in discharging his “duty.” If Coulter’s son had not been married to Malcolm’s daughter, it is probable that not even his complete subserviency would have enabled him to keep his place.
“If you had told me frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr. Coulter,” he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter’s Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm’s having to “flop” the paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, “we would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your stealthiness has made the ass bray at us instead of with and for us. And that is dangerous when you consider that running a newspaper is like running a restaurant—you must please your customers every day afresh.”
Coulter was further difficult because of his anxieties about social position for himself and his family. He was disturbed whenever the News-Record published an item that might offend any of the people whose acquaintance he had gained with so much difficulty, and for whose good will he was willing to sacrifice even considerable money. Personally, but very privately, he edited the News-Record’s “fashionable intelligence” columns on Sunday and made them an exhibit of his own sycophancy and snobbishness which excited the amused disgust of all who were in the secret.
Malcolm liked Howard, admired him, in a way envied his fearlessness, his earnestness for principles. For years he had had it in mind to retire and write a history of the Civil War period which had been his own period of greatest activity and most intimate acquaintance with the behind-the-scenes of statecraft. Howard’s energy, steady application, enthusiasm for journalism and intelligence both as to editorials and as to news made Malcolm look upon him as his natural successor.
“I think Howard is the man we want,” he said to his two associates when he was arranging the dinner. “He has new ideas—just what the paper needs. He is in touch with these recent developments. And above all he has judgment. He knows what not to print, where and how to print what ought to be printed. He is still young and is over-enthusiastic. He has limitations, but he knows them and he is eager and capable to learn.”
It was a “shop” dinner, Howard doing most of the talking, led on by Malcolm. The main point was the “new journalism,” as it was called, and how to adapt it to the News-Record and the News-Record to it.
Malcolm kept the conversation closely to news and news-ideas, fearing that, if editorial policies were brought in, Howard would make “breaks.” He soon saw that his associates were much impressed with Howard, with his judgment, with his knowledge of the details of every important newspaper in the city, with his analysis of the good and bad points in each.
“I’ll drop you at your corner,” said he to Howard at the end of the dinner. As they drove up the Avenue he began: “How would you like to be the editor of the News-Record? My place, I mean.”
“I don’t understand,” Howard answered, bewildered.
“I am going to retire at once,” Malcolm went on. “I’ve been at it nearly fifty years—ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I’ve been in charge there almost a quarter of a century. I think I’ve earned a few years of leisure to work for my own amusement. I’m pretty sure they’ll want you to take my place. Would you like it?”
“I’m not fit for it,” Howard said, and he meant it. “I’m only an apprentice. I’m always making blunders—but I needn’t tell you about that.”
“You can’t say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the question is not, are you fit? but, is there any one more fit than you? I confess I don’t see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the paper all of the best that there is in him.”
“Of course I’d like to try. I can only fail.”
“Oh, you won’t fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and Coulter—especially Coulter. In fact, I’m sure you’ll quarrel with them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you’ll probably win out. Only——”
Malcolm hesitated, then went on:
“I stopped giving advice years ago. But I’ll venture a suggestion. Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue. Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don’t strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem of no consequence the next morning but one after the election.”
“I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil, what you now put into words. But there is something in me—an instinct, perhaps—that forces me on in spite of myself. I’ve learned to curb and guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger, more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I should fail miserably. I should be lost, compassless, rudderless. I have often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad mess of my career.”
As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms at “sentimental bosh.” But instead, Malcolm’s face was melancholy; and his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just starting where he had started so many years ago:
“No doubt you are right. I’m not intending to try to dissuade you from—from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution, self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other side—these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action. All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly. Its folly remains its essential characteristic.”
Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the News-Record. His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting upon Malcolm’s advice, gave him a “free hand” for one year. They agreed not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.
The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the office, read among the “Incidents in Society:”
Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed in the Campania yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport season.
While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three hundred thousand copies, the News-Record—the best-written, the most complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the most accurate—circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two other newspapers had almost half a million.
The theory of the News-Record staff was that their journal was too “respectable,” too intelligent, to be widely read; that the “yellow journals” grovelled, “appealed to the mob,” drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record’s smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.
Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of the “yellow journals” with the most intelligent, alert and progressive public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste. He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of satisfying the demands of the public.
He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff. But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose coöperation was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship one of the young reporters—Frank Cumnock.
He chose Cumnock for this position, in many respects the most important on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood and, finally and chiefly, because he had a “news-sense,” keener than that of any other man on the paper.
For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. Cumnock persuaded Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days’ work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer’s house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description Cumnock got upon the track of Thayer’s niece and her husband, found the proof of their guilt, had them watched until the News-Record came out with the “beat,” then turned them over to the police.
Also, Cumnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He found in the New England edition of The World a six-line item giving an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City Editor to assign him to go there; and within a week the press of the entire country was discussing the News-Record’s exposure of the barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and his keepers.
“We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news,” Howard said to Cumnock. “They’ve put you here because, so they tell me, you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised. And I assure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true? Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?”
“Is that ‘straight’?” asked Cumnock. “No favourites? No suppressions? No exploitations?”
“‘Straight’—‘dead straight’! And if I were you I’d make this particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If anybody”—with stress upon the anybody—“comes to you about this, send him to me.”
Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.
“We look too dull,” King began when Howard asked him if he had any changes to suggest. “We need more and bigger headlines, and we need pictures.”
“That is it!” Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in perfect accord. “But we must not have pictures unless we can have the best. Just at present we can’t increase expenses by any great amount. What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger headlines and plenty of leads?”
“I’m sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”
“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that phrase—‘our class of readers’—much longer. Our paper should interest every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s audience should be like that of a good play—the orchestra chairs full and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an ‘organ’ any longer?”
“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that we’re free to print the news?”
“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper—all the news and nothing but the news.”
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. “Hum—hum,” he said. “This is news. Well—the circulation’ll go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”
Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria—the mad rush for sensation and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the paper look like a series of disordered dreams.
He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted, was—results.
The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six years, his weekly “night off” and his two weeks’ vacation in summer excepted, had “made up” the paper—that is to say, had defined, with the advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous conservative. He believed that an editor’s duty was done when he had intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with Howard’s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.
“We’re on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the ‘yellow journals’ for the pennies of the mob,” he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King, one afternoon just as Howard joined them.
Howard laughed. “Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in the gutter, actually scuffling.”
“Well, I’m frank to say that I don’t like it. A newspaper ought to appeal to the intelligent.”
“To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion, that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we’re intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they’re intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But let’s go out to dinner this evening and talk it over.”
They dined together at Mouquin’s every night for a week. At the end of that time Vroom, still sarcastic and grumbling, was a convert. And a great accession Howard found him. He had sound judgment as to the value of news-items—what demanded first page, the “show-window,” because it would interest everybody; what was worth a line on an inside page because it would interest only a few thousands. He was the most skillful of the News-Record’s many good writers of headlines, a master of that, for the newspaper, art of arts—condensed and interesting statement, alluring the glancing reader to read on. Also he had an eye for effects with type. “You make every page a picture,” Howard said to him. “It is wonderful how you balance your headlines, emphasising the important news yet saving the minor items from obscurity. I should like to see the paper you would make if you had the right sort of illustrations to put in.”
Vroom was amazed at himself. He who had opposed any “head” which broke the column rule was now so far degenerated into a “yellow journalist” that, when Howard spoke of illustrations, he actually longed to test his skill at distributing them effectively.
Two months of hard work, tedious, because necessarily so indirect, produced a newspaper which was “on the right lines,” as Howard understood right lines. And he felt that the time had come to make the necessary radical changes in the editorial page.
The News-Record had long posed as independent because it supported now one political party and now the other, or divided its support. But this superficial independence was in reality subservience to the financial interests of the two principal owners. They made their newspaper assail Republican or Democratic corruption and misgovernment in city, state or nation, according as their personal interests lay. They used the editorial page and, to even better advantage, the news-columns, in revenging themselves for too heavy levies of blackmail upon their corrupt interests or in securing unjust legislation and privileges.
Obedient and cynical Mr. Malcolm had made the editorial page corrupt and brilliant—never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal friends—the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering the poisoned arrows of raillery and satire. Again he was the plain-spoken friend of the cause and warned its honest supporters against these “fool friends” whom he pretended to regard as its leaders. Again he played the part of a blind enthusiast and praised folly as wisdom and urged it on to more damaging activities.
“We abhor humbug here,” he used to say; and perhaps he did in a measure excuse himself to his conscience with the phrase. But in fact his editorial page was usually a succession of humbugs, of brilliant hypocrisies and cheats perpetrated under the guise of exposing humbug.
Just as Howard was ready to reverse Malcolm’s editorial programme, New York was seized with one of its “periodic spasms of virtue.” The city government was, as usual, in the hands of the two bosses who owned the two political machines. One was taking the responsibility and the larger share of the spoils; the other was maintaining him in power and getting the smaller but a satisfactory share. The alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the “purification” of the city.
Every man of sense knowing human nature and the conditions of city life knew that this plan was foredoomed to ridiculous failure, and that the event would be a popular revulsion against “reform.”
“Why not speak the truth about these vice-hunters?” Howard was discussing the situation with three of his editorial writers—Segur, Huntington and Montgomery.
“It’s mighty dangerous,” Montgomery objected. “You will be sticking knives into a sacred Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.”
“Yes, we’ll have all the good people about our ears,” said Segur. “We’ll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They’ll thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing accounts of the ‘exposure’ of the dives and dens.”
“That’s good. I hope we shall,” said Howard cheerfully. “It will advertise us tremendously.”
The three were better pleased than they would have admitted to themselves by the seeming certainty of Howard’s impending undoing.
“No, gentlemen,” Howard said, as they were about to go to their rooms for the day’s work. “There’s no danger in attacking any hypocrisy. Don’t attack beliefs that are universal or nearly universal—at least not openly. But don’t be afraid of a hypocrisy because it is universal. People know that they are hypocrites in respect of it. They may not have the courage publicly to applaud you. But they’ll be privately delighted and will admire your courage. We’ll try to be discreet and we’ll be careful to be truthful. And we’ll begin by making these gentlemen show themselves up.”
The next morning the News-Record published a double-leaded editorial. It described the importance of improving political and social conditions in New York; it went on to note the distinguished names on the committee for the destruction of vice; it closed with the announcement that on the following day the News-Record would publish the views of these eminent reformers upon conditions and remedies.
The next day he printed the interviews—a collection of curiosities in utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard’s theory of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews. By adroit quotations, by contrasting one with another, he showed, or rather made the so-called reformers themselves show, that where they were sincere they were in the main silly, and where they were plausible they were in the main insincere; that every man of them had his own pet scheme for the salvation of wicked New York; and that they could not possibly accomplish anything more valuable than leading the people on the familiar, aimless, demoralizing excursion through the slums.
On the following day he frankly laughed at them as a lot of impracticables who either did not know the patent facts of city life or refused to admit those facts. And he turned his attention to the real problem, a respectable administration for the city—a practical end which could easily be accomplished by practical action. From day to day he kept this up, publishing a splendid series of articles, humorous, witty, satirical, eloquent, bold, with a dominant strain of sincerity and plain common sense. As his associates had predicted, a storm gathered and burst in fury about the News-Record. It was denounced by “leading citizens,” including many of the clergy. Its “esteemed” contemporaries published and endorsed and amplified the abuse. And its circulation went up at the rate of five thousand a day.
When the storm was at its height, when the whole town seemed to be agreeing with the angry reformers but was quietly laughing at their folly and hypocrisy, Howard threw his bomb. On a Saturday morning he gave half of his first page with big but severely impartial headlines to an analysis of the members of the vice committee—a broadside of facts often hinted but never before verified and published. First came those who owned property and sub-let it for vicious purposes, the property and purpose specified in detail; then those who were directors in corporations which had got corrupt privileges from the local boss, the privileges being carefully specified, and also the amounts of which they had robbed the city. Last came those who were directors in corporations which had bought from the State-boss injustices and licenses to rob, the specifications given in damning detail.
His leading editorial was entitled “Why We Don’t Have Decent Government.” It was powerful in its simplicity, its merciless raillery and irony; and only at the very end did it contain passion. There, in a few eloquent sentences he arraigned these professed reformers who were growing rich through the boss-system, who were trafficking with the bosses and were now engaged in wrecking the hopes of honesty and decency. On that day the News-Record’s circulation went up thirty thousand. The town rang with its “exposure” and the attention of the whole country was arrested. It was one of the historic “beats” of New York journalism. The reputation of the News-Record for fearlessness and truth-telling and news-enterprise was established. At abound it had become the most conspicuous and one of the most powerful journals in New York.
Howard, riding in the Park one morning late in the spring, came upon Mrs. Carnarvon. She gave him no chance to evade her, but joined him and accommodated her horse’s pace to his.
“And are you still on the News-Record?” she said. “I hope not.”
“Why?” Howard was smiling, glad to get an outside view of what he had been doing.
“Because it’s become so sensational. It used to be such a nice paper. And now—gracious, what headlines! What attacks on the very best people in the town!”
“Dreadful, isn’t it?” laughed Howard. “We’ve become so depraved that we are actually telling the truth about somebodies instead of only about nobodies.”
“I might have known that you would sympathise with that sort of thing.” Mrs. Carnarvon was teasing, yet reproachful. “You always were an anarchist.”
“Is it anarchistic to be no respecter of persons and to put big headlines over big items and little headlines over little items?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. You are encouraging the unruly classes.”
“Dear me! And we thought we were fighting the unruly class. We thought that it was our friends—or rather, your friends—the franchise grabbers and legislature-buyers who won’t obey the laws unless the laws happen to suit their convenience. They’re the only unruly class I know anything about. I’ve heard of another kind but I’ve never been able to find it. And I never hear much about it except when a lot of big rascals are making off weighted down with plunder. They always shout back over their shoulders: ‘Don’t raise a disturbance or you’ll arouse the unruly classes.’”
Mrs. Carnarvon was laughing. “You put it well,” she said, “and I’m not clever enough to answer you. But they all tell me the News-Record has become a dangerous paper, that it’s attacking everybody who has anything.”
“Anything he has stolen, yes. But that’s all.”
“You can’t get me to sympathise with you. I like well-dressed, well-mannered people who speak good English.”
“So do I. That’s why I’m doing all in my power to improve the conditions for making more and more people of the sort one likes to talk to and dine with.”
“Why, I thought you sympathised with the lower classes.”
“Not a bit of it. Who has been maligning me to you? I abhor the lower classes—so much so that I wish to see them abolished.”
“Well, you’ll have to blame Marian for misleading me.”
“Miss Trevor? How is she?” Mrs. Carnarvon was looking closely at him, and he was not sure that he succeeded in showing nothing more than friendly interest.
“Haven’t you heard from her? She’s in England, visiting in Lancashire. You know her cousin married Lord Cranmore.”
“I saw in the papers several months ago that she was going abroad. I haven’t heard a word since.”
Mrs. Carnarvon started to say something, but changed her mind.
“When is she coming home?”
“Not until July. You must come to see us at Newport.”
“Nothing could please me better—if I can get away.”
“I’ll send you an invitation, although you have treated me very badly of late. But I suppose you are busy.”
“Busy? Isn’t a galley slave always busy?”
“Are you still writing editorials?”
“Yes—and on the fallen News-Record. In fact——”
“Well—what?”
Howard laughed. “Don’t faint,” he said. “I’ll leave you at once if you wish me to, and I’ll never give it away that you once knew me. I’m the editor—the responsible devil for the depravity.”
“How interesting!” Mrs. Carnarvon was evidently not disturbed. Then the American adoration of success came out. “I’m so glad you’re getting on. I always knew you would. Really, you must come to dinner. I’ll invite some of the people you’ve been attacking. They’ll like to look at you, and you will be amused by them. And I don’t in the least mind your giving it to them if they bait you, as I did this morning. Will you come?”
“If I may leave by ten o’clock. I go down town every night.”
“Why, when do you sleep?”
“Not much, these days. Life’s too interesting to permit of much sleep. I’ll make up when it slackens a bit.”
As he was turning his horse, she said: “Marian’s address is Claridge’s, Brooke Street, Mayfair. If she isn’t there, they forward her mail.”
Howard was puzzled. “What made her give me that address?” he thought. “I know she didn’t like my seeing so much of Marian. And here she is practically inviting me to write to her.” He could not understand it. “If I were not a ‘yellow’ editor and if Marian were not engaged to one of the richest men in New York, I’d say that this lady was encouraging me.” He smiled. “Not yet—not just yet.” And he cheerfully urged his horse into a canter.
Mrs. Carnarvon’s opinion of the News-Record and its recent performances fairly represented that of the fashionable and the very rich. They read it, as they never did before, because it interested them. They could not deny that what it said was true; that is, they could not deny it to their own minds, although they did vigorously deny it publicly. Those who were attacked directly or indirectly, or expected to be attacked, denounced the paper as an “outrage,” a “disgrace to the city,” a “specimen of the journalism of the gutter.” Many who were not in sympathy with the men or the methods assailed thought that its course was “inexpedient,” “tended to increase discontent among the lower classes,” “weakened the influence of the better classes.” Only a few of the “triumphant classes” saw the real value and benefit of the News-Record’s frank attacks upon greed and hypocrisy, saw that these attacks were not dangerous or demagogical because they were just and were combined with a careful avoidance of encouragement to the lazy, the envious, the incompetent and the ignorant.
Fortunately for Howard’s peace, that eminent New York “multi,” Samuel Jocelyn, for whom Coulter had the highest respect, was of this last class. When Howard began, Coulter was at Aiken where Jocelyn had a cottage. He had never been able to make headway with Jocelyn, and Mrs. Jocelyn deigned to give him and Mrs. Coulter only the coldest of cold nods. Just as Coulter had become so agitated by Howard’s radical course that he was preparing to go to New York to remonstrate with him, Jocelyn called.
“I came to thank you for what you are doing with your paper,” he said cordially. “It seems to me that all intelligent men who are not blind to their own ultimate interests ought to stand by you. I can’t tell you how much I admire your frankness and honesty. And you draw the line just right. You attack plunder, you defend property. Will your wife and you dine with us this evening?”
Coulter postponed his trip to New York.
On the last day of the first three months the circulation of the News-Record was 147,253—an increase of 42,150 over what it was on the day Howard took charge; its advertising had increased twelve per cent; its net profits for the quarter were seventy-five thousand dollars as against fifty-seven thousand for the preceding quarter.
“Very good indeed,” was Stokely’s comment.
“Another quarter like this,” said Howard, “and I’m going to ask you to let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to illustrate the paper.”
“We’ll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this ‘yellow-journalism’—when it’s done intelligently. I always told Coulter we’d have to come to it. It’s only common sense to make a paper easy reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence—in fact, we have already. I’m getting what I want up at Albany this winter much cheaper.”
Howard winced. “He made me feel like a blackmailer,” he said to himself when Stokely had gone. “And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see.”
He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely’s cynical words persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have demanded an explanation?
He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it, but the thought still stared him in the face—“I am not so strong in my ideals of personal character as I was a year ago.”
The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth and power with self-abasement or poverty, obscurity with self-respect were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions—“I will settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely’s remark did not make a crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I’ll be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to succeed.”
But Stokely’s words and his own silence and the real reasons for his changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.
Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to the compensation of those who were paid by space and made little.
If his work had not been his amusement the long hours, the constant application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from one department to another.
In June his salary was increased to twenty-five thousand a year and his last lingering feeling of financial insecurity disappeared. For the first time in his life he felt strong enough to undertake a serious responsibility, to give hostages to fortune without fear of being unable to keep faith. He learned from Mrs. Carnarvon that Marian was returning on the Oceanic on the ninth of July, and he accepted a Saturday-to-Monday invitation to Newport for the twelfth of July. It was from Segur that he got the news that Danvers was in Japan and was not returning until the autumn.
On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the Oceanic steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned. “Is it a good story?” he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered. “Was there anybody on board?”
“A lot of swell people,” the young man answered; “all the women got up in the latest Paris gowns.”
“Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?”
“Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called ‘Marian, my dear.’”
Howard stopped him with “Thank you. Don’t write anything about them.”
“It was the best thing I saw—the funniest.”
“Well—don’t use the names.”
Young Blackwell turned to go. “Oh, I see—friends of yours,” he smiled. “Very well. I’ll keep ‘em out.”
Howard flushed and called him back. “Go ahead,” he said. “Write just what you were going to. Of course you wouldn’t write anything that was not fair and truthful. We don’t ‘play favourites’ here. Forget what I said.”
And so it came to pass that Mrs. Provost, half pleased, half indignant, said to Miss Trevor as they sat in the drawing room of the Pullman on the way to Newport the next day: “Just look at this, Marian dear, in the horrid News-Record. And it used to be such a nice paper with that slimy Coulter bowing and scraping to everybody.”
“This” was Mrs. Provost and her dogs and her maids and her asides to “Marian dear,” described with accuracy and a keen sense of the ludicrous.
“It’s too dreadful,” she continued. “There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us,” with a slight accent on the pronoun, “as common and public as tenement-house people.”
“Yes,” Miss Trevor answered absently. “But why read the newspapers? I never could get interested in them, though I’ve tried.”