Samuel Hopkins Adams - The Clarion

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"What's all this about?"

"Uncle Guardy! You mustn't, you really mustn't come in on tiptoe that
way."

"Stamped like an elephant," asserted Dr. Elliot. "But you were so
immersed in your floral designs--What kind of a play is it?"

She turned upon him the sparkle of golden lights in wine-brown eyes.
"It's a fairy bower. I'm going to do a bewitchment."

"Upon what victim?"

"Upon a newspaper. I'm going to be a fairy godmother sort of witch and
save my foster-child by--by arointing something out of print."

"Doing _what_?"

"Arointing it. Don't you know, you say, 'Aroint thee, witch,' when you
want to get rid of her? Well, if a witch can be arointed, why shouldn't
she aroint other things?"

"All very well, if you understand the process. Do you?"

"Of course. It's done 'with woven paces and with waving arms.' 'Beware,
beware; her flashing eyes, her float--'"

"Stop it! You shall not make a poetry cocktail out of Tennyson and
Coleridge, and jam it down my throat; or I'll aroint myself. Besides,
you're not a witch, at all. I know you for all your big cap, and your
cloak, and the basket on your arm. 'Grandmother, what makes your teeth
so white?'"

"No, no. I'm not that kind of a beastie, at all. Wrong guess, Guardy."

"Yet there's a gleam of the hunt about you. Is it, oh, is it, the Great
American Pumess that I have the honor to address?"

She made him a sweeping bow. "In a good cause."

"About which I shall doubtless hear to-morrow?"

"Don't I always confess my good actions?"

"At what hour does the victim's dying shriek rend the quivering air?"

"Mr. Surtaine is due here at half past eight."

"Humph! Young Surtaine, eh? Shy bird, if it has taken all this time to
bring him down. Well, run and dress. It's after five and that gives you
less than three hours for prinking up, counting dinner in."

Whatever time and effort may have gone to the making of the Great
American Pumess's toilet, Hal thought, as he came down the long room to
where she stood embowered in pink, that he had never beheld anything so
freshly lovely. She gave him a warm and yielding hand in welcome, and
drew away a bit, surveying him up and down with friendly eyes.

"You're looking unusually smart to-night," she approved. "London clothes
don't set so well on many Americans. But your tie is askew. Wait. Let me
do it."

With deft fingers she twitched and patted the bow into submission. The
touch of intimacy represented the key in which she had chosen to pitch
her play. Sinking back into a cushioned corner of the settee, she curled
up cozily, and motioned him to a chair.

"Draw it around," she directed. "I want you where you can't get away,
for I'm going to cast a spell over you."

"_Going_ to?" The accent on the first word was stronger than the reply
necessitated.

"Do many people ask favors of an editor?"

"More than enough."

"And is the editor often kind and obliging?"

"That depends on the favor."

"Not a little bit on the asker?"

"Naturally, that, too."

"Your tone isn't very encouraging." She searched his face with her
limpid, lingering regard. "Did you bring the proofs?"

"Yes."

Still holding his eyes to hers, she stretched out her hand to receive
the strip of print, "Do you think I'd better read it?"

"No."

"Then I will."

Studying her face, as she read, Hal saw it change from gay to grave, saw
her quiver and wince with a swiftly indrawn breath, and straightened his
spine to what he knew was coming.

"Oh, it's cruel," she said in a low tone, letting the paper fall on her
knee.

"It's true," said Hal.

"Oh, no! Even if it were, it ought not to be published."

"Why?"

"Because--" The girl hesitated.

"Because she's one of us?"

"No. Yes. It has something to do with my feeling, I suppose. Why, you've
been a guest at her house."

"Suppose I have. The 'Clarion' hasn't."

"Isn't that rather a fine distinction?"

"On the contrary. Personally, I might refrain from saying anything about
it. Journalistically, how can I? It's the business of the 'Clarion' to
give the news. More than that: it's the honor of the 'Clarion.'"

"But what possible good will it do?"

"If it did no other good, it would warn other reckless drivers."

"Let the police look to that. It's their business."

"You know that the police dare do nothing to the daughter of Elias M.
Pierce. See here, Partner,"--Hal's tone grew gentle,--"don't you recall,
in that long talk we had about the paper, one afternoon, how you backed
me up when I told you what I meant to do in the way of making the
'Clarion' honest and clean and strong enough to be straight in its
attitude toward the public? Why, you've been the inspiration of all that
I've been trying to do. I thought that was the true Esme. Wasn't it? Was
I wrong? You're not going back on me, now?"

"But she's so young," pleaded Esme, shifting her ground before this
attack. "She doesn't think. She's never had to think. Your article makes
her look a--a murderess. It isn't fair. It isn't true, really. If you
could have seen her here, so frightened, so broken. She cried in my
arms. I told her it shouldn't be printed. I promised."

Here was the Great American Pumess at bay, and suddenly splendid in her
attitude of protectiveness. In that moment, she had all but broken Hal's
resolution. He rose and walked over to the window, to clear his thought
of the overpowering appeal of her loveliness.

"How can I--" he began, coming back: but paused because she was holding
out to him the proof. Across it, in pencil, was written, "Must not," and
the initials, E.S.M.E.

"Kill it," she urged softly.

"And my honesty with it."

"Oh, no. It can't be so fatal, to be kind for once. Let her off, poor
child."

Hal stood irresolute.

"If it were I?" she insisted softly.

"If it were you, would you ask it?"

"I shouldn't have to. I'd trust you."

The sweetness of it shook him. But he still spoke steadily.

"Others trust me, now. The men in the office. Trust me to be honest."

Again she felt the solid wall of character blocking her design, and
within herself raged and marveled, and more deeply, admired. Resentment
was uppermost, however. Find a way through that barrier she must and
would. Whatever scruples may have been aroused by his appeal to her she
banished. No integer of the impressionable sex had ever yet won from her
such a battle. None ever should: and assuredly not this one. The Great
American Pumess was now all feline.

She leaned forward to him. "You promised."

"I?"

"Have you forgotten?"

"I have never forgotten one word that has passed between us since I
first saw you."

"Ah; but when was that?"

"Seven weeks ago to-day, at the station."

[Illustration: "KILL IT," SHE URGED SOFTLY.]

"Fifteen years ago this summer," she corrected. "You _have_ forgotten,"
She laughed gayly at the amazement in his face. "And the promise." Up
went a pink-tipped finger in admonition. "Listen and be ashamed, O
faithless knight. 'Little girl, little girl: I'd do anything in the
world for you, little girl. Anything in the world, if ever you asked
me.' Think, and remember. Have you a scar on your left shoulder?"

The effort of recollection dimmed Hal's face. "Wait! I'm beginning to
see. The light of the torches across the square, and the man with the
knife.--Then darkness.--was unconscious, wasn't I?--Then the fairy child
with the soft eyes, looking down at me. Little girl, little girl, it was
you! That is why I seemed to remember, that day at the station, before I
knew you."

"Yes," she said, smiling up at him.

"How wonderful! And you remembered. How more than wonderful!"

"Yes, I remembered." It was no part of her plan--quite relentless,
now--to tell him that her uncle had recounted to her the events of that
far-distant night, and that she had been holding them in reserve for
some hitherto undetermined purpose of coquetry. So she spoke the lie
without a tremor. What he would say next, she almost knew. Nor did he
disappoint her expectation.

"And so you've come back into my life after all these years!"

"You haven't taken back your proof." She slipped it into his hand. "What
have you done with my subscription-flower?"

"The arbutus? It stands always on my desk."

"Do you see the rest of it anywhere?"

Her eyes rested on a tiny vase set in a hanging window-box of flowers,
and holding a brown and withered wisp. "I tend those flowers myself,"
she continued. "And I leave the dead arbutus there to remind me of the
responsibilities of journalism--and of the hold I have over the
incorruptible editor."

"Does it weigh upon you?" He answered the tender laughter in her eyes.

"Only the uncertainty of it."

"Do you realize how strong it is, Esme?"

"Not so strong, apparently, as certain foolish scruples." A soft color
rose in her face, as she half-buried it in a great mass of apple
blossom. From the mass she chose a spray, and set it in the bosom of her
dress, then got to her feet and moved slowly toward him. "You're not
wearing my colors to-night." This was directed to the white rose in his
buttonhole. He took it out and tossed it into the fireplace.

"Pink's the only wear," declared the girl gayly. With delicate fingers
she detached a little luxuriant twig of the bloom from her breast, and
set it in the place where the rose had been. Her face was close to his.
He could feel her hands above his heart.

"Please," she breathed.

"What?" He was playing for time and reason.

"For Kathleen Pierce. Please."

His hand closed over hers. "You are bribing me."

If she said it again, she knew that he would kiss her. So she spoke,
with lifted face and eyes of uttermost supplication. "For me. Please."

Men had kissed Esme Elliot before; for she had played every turn of the
game of coquetry. Some she had laughed to scorn and dismissed; some she
had sweetly rebuked, and held to their adoring fealty. She had known the
kiss of headlong passion, of love's humility, of desperation, even of
hot anger; but none had ever visited her lips twice. The game, for her,
was ended with the surrender and the avowal; and she protected herself
the more easily in that her pulses had never been stirred to more than
the thrill of triumph.

In Hal Surtaine's arms she was playing for another stake. So intent had
she been upon her purpose that the guerdon of the modern Venus Victrix,
the declaration of the lover, was held in the background of her mind.
For a swift, bewildering moment, she felt his lips upon hers, the
gentlest, the tenderest pressure, instantly relaxed: then the sudden
knowledge of him for what he was, a loyal and chivalrous gentleman thus
beguiled, burned her with a withering and intolerable shame.
Simultaneously she felt her heart go out to him as never yet had it gone
to any man, and in that secret shock to her maidenhood, the coquette in
her waned and the woman waxed.

She drew back, quivering, aghast. With all the force of this new and
tumultuous emotion, she hoped for her own defeat: yearned over him that
he should refuse that for which she had unworthily pressed. Yet, such is
the perversity of that strange struggle against the great surrender,
that she gathered every power of her sex to gain the dreaded victory. By
an effort she commanded her voice, releasing herself from his arms.

"Wait. Don't speak to me for a minute," she said hoarsely.

"But I must speak, now,--dear, dearest."

"Am--am I that to you?" The feline in her caught desperately at the
opportunity.

"Always. From the first."

"But--you forgot."

"Let me atone with the rest of my life for that treason." He laughed
happily.

"You keep your promise, then, to the little girl?" At her feet lay the
galley proof. Birdlike she darted down upon it, seized, and tore it half
across. "No: you do it," she commanded, thrusting it into his hand.

No longer was he master of himself. The kiss had undermined him. "Must
I?" he said.

Victorious and aghast, she yet smiled into his face. "I knew I could
believe in you," she cried. "You're a true knight, after all. I declare
you my Knight-Editor. No well-equipped journalistic partnership should
be without one."

Perhaps had the phrase been different, Hal might have yielded. So
narrow a margin of chance divides the paths of honor and dishonor, to
mortals groping dimly through the human maze. But the words were an echo
to wake memory. Rugged, harsh, and fine the face of McGuire Ellis rose
before Hal. He heard the rough voice, with its undertone of affection
beneath the jocularity of the rather feeble pun, and it called him back
like a trumpet summons to the loyalty which he had promised to the men
of the "Clarion." He slipped the half-torn paper into his pocket.

"I can't do it, Esme."

"You--can't--do--it?"

"No." Finality was in the monosyllable.

She looked into his leveled and quiet eyes, and knew that she had lost.
And the demon of perversity, raging, stung her to its purposes.

"After this, you tell me that you can't, you won't?"

"Dearest! You're not going to let it make a difference in our love for
each other."

"_Our_ love! You go far, and fast."

"Do I go too far, since you have let me kiss you?"

"I didn't," she cried.

"Then you meant nothing by it?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "You are trying to take advantage of a
position which you forced," she said coldly.

"Let me understand this clearly." He had turned white. "You let me make
love to you, in order to entrap me and save your friend. Is that it?"

No reply came from her other than what he could read in compressed lips
and smouldering eyes.

"So that is the kind of woman you are." There were both wonder and
distress in his voice. "That is the kind of woman for whose promise to
be my wife I would have given the heart out of my body."

At this the tumult and catastrophe of her emotion fused into a white
hot, illogical anger against this man who was suffering, and by his
suffering made her suffer.

"Your wife? Yours?" She smiled hatefully. "The wife of the son of a
quack? You do yourself too much honor, Hal Surtaine."

"I fear that I did you too much honor," he replied quietly.

Suffocation pressed upon her throat as she saw him go to the door. For a
moment the wild desire to hold him, to justify herself, to explain, even
to ask forgiveness, seized her. Bitterly she fought it down, and so
stood, with wide eyes and smiling lips. At the door he turned to look,
with a glance less of appeal than of incredulity that she, so lovely, so
alluring, so desirable beyond all the world, a creature of springtime
and promise embowered amidst the springtime and promise of the
apple-bloom, could be such as her speech and action proclaimed her.

Hal carried from her house, like a barbed arrow, the memory of that
still and desperate smile.

CHAPTER XVII

REPRISALS

Working on an empty heart is almost as severe a strain as the less
poetic process of working on an empty stomach. On the morning after the
failure of Esme's strategy and the wrecking of Hal's hopes, the young
editor went to his office with a languid but bitter distaste for its
demands. The first item in the late afternoon mail stung him to a fitter
spirit, as a sharp blow will spur to his best efforts a courageous
boxer. This was a packet, containing the crumbled fragments of a spray
of arbutus, and a note in handwriting now stirringly familiar.

I have read your editorial. From a man dishonest enough to print
deliberate lies and cowardly enough to attack a woman, it is just
such an answer as I might have expected.

ELEANOR S.M. ELLIOT.

At first the reference to the editorial bewildered Hal. Then he
remembered. Esme had known nothing of the editorial until she read it in
the paper. She had inferred that he wrote it after leaving her, thus
revenging himself upon her by further scarification of the friend for
whom she had pleaded. To the charge of deliberate mendacity he had no
specific clue, not knowing that Kathleen Pierce had denied the
authenticity of the interview. He mused somberly upon the venomed
injustice of womankind. The note and its symbol of withered sweetness he
buried in his waste-basket. If he could but discard as readily the
vision of a face, strangely lovely in its anger and chagrin, and wearing
that set and desperate smile! Well, there was but one answer to her
note. That was to make the "Clarion" all that she would have it not be!

No phantoms of lost loveliness came between McGuire Ellis and his
satisfaction over the Pierce _coup_. Characteristically, however, he
presented the disadvantageous as well as the favorable aspects of the
matter to his employer.

"Some paper this morning!" he began. "The town is humming like a hive."

"Over the Pierce story?" asked Hal.

"Nothing else talked of. We were sold out before nine this morning."

"Selling papers is our line of business," observed the owner-editor.

"You won't think so when you hear Shad Shearson. He's an avalanche of
woe, waiting to sweep down upon you."

"What's his trouble? The department store advertising?"

"The Boston Store advertising is gone. Others are threatening to follow.
Pierce has called a meeting of the Publications Committee of the Dry
Goods Union. Discipline is in the air, Boss. Have you seen the evening
papers?"

"Yes."

"What did you think of their stories of the accident?"

"I seemed to notice a suspicious similarity."

"You can bet every one of those stories came straight from E.M. Pierce's
own office. You'll see, they'll be the same in to-morrow morning's
papers. Now that we've opened up, they all have to cover the news, so
they've thoughtfully sent around to inquire what Elias M. would like to
have printed."

"From what they say," remarked Hal flippantly, "the nurse ought to be
arrested for trying to bump a sixty-horsepower car out of the roadway."

"We strive to please, in the local newspaper shops."

Ellis turned to answer the buzzing telephone. "Get on your life
preserver," he advised his principal. "Shearson's coming up to weep all
over you."

The advertising manager entered, his plump cheeks sagging into
lugubrious and reproachful lines, speaking witnesses to a sentiment not
wholly unjustifiable in his case. To see circulation steadily going up
and advertising as steadily going down, is an irritant experience to the
official responsible for the main income of a daily paper, advertising
revenue.

"Advertisers have some rights," he boomed, in his heavy voice.

"Including that of homicide?" asked Hal.

"Let the law take care of that. It ain't our affair."

"Would it be our affair if Pierce didn't control advertising?"

Shearson's fat hands went to his fat neck in a gesture of desperation.
"That's different," he cried. "I can't seem to make you see my point.
Why looka here, Mr. Surtaine. Who pays for the running of a newspaper?
The advertisers. Where do your profits come from? Advertising. There
never was a paper could last six months on circulation alone. It's the
ads. that keep every paper going. Well, then: how's a paper going to
live that turns against its own support? Tell me that. If you were
running a business, and a big buyer came in, would you roast him and
knock his methods, and criticize his family, and then expect to sell him
a bill of goods? Or would you take him out to the theater and feed him a
fat cigar, and treat him the best you know how? You might have your own
private opinion of him--"

"A newspaper doesn't deal in private opinions," put in Hal.

"Well, it can keep 'em private for its own good, can't it? How many
readers care whether E.M. Pierce's daughter ran over a woman or not?
What difference does it make to them? They'd be just as well satisfied
to read about the latest kick-up in Mexico, or the scandal at
Washington, or Mrs. Whoopdoodle's Newport dinner to the troupe of
educated fleas. But it makes a lot of difference to E.M. Pierce, and he
can make it a lot of difference to us. So long as he pays us good money,
he's got a right to expect us to look out for his interests."

"So have our readers who pay us good money, Mr. Shearson."

"What are their interests?" asked the advertising manager, staring.

"To get the news straight. You've given me your theory of journalism;
now let me give you mine. As I look at it, there's a contract of honor
between a newspaper and its subscribers. Tacitly the newspaper says to
the subscriber, 'For two cents a day, I agree to furnish you with the
news of your town, state, nation, and the outside world, selected to the
best of my ability, and presented without fear or favor.' On this basis,
if the newspaper fakes its news, if it distorts facts, or if it
suppresses them, it is playing false with its subscribers. It is sanding
its sugar, and selling shoddy for all-wool. Isn't that true?"

"Every newspaper does it," grumbled Shearson. "And the public knows it."

"Doubted. The public knows that newspapers make mistakes and do a lot of
exaggerating and sensationalizing. But you once get it into their heads
that a certain newspaper is concealing and suppressing news, and see how
long that paper will last. The circulation will drop and the very men
like Pierce will be the first to withdraw their advertising patronage.
Your keen advertiser doesn't waste time fishing in dead pools. So even
as a matter of policy the straight way may be the best, in the long run.
Whether it is or not, get this firmly into your mind, Mr. Shearson. From
now on the first consideration of the 'Clarion' will be news and not
advertising."

"Then, good-_night_ 'Clarion,'" pronounced Shearson with entire
solemnity.

"Is that your resignation, Mr. Shearson?"

"Do you want me to quit?"

"No; I don't. I believe you're an efficient man, if you can adjust
yourself to new conditions. Do you think you can?"

"Well, I ain't much on the high-brow stuff, Mr. Surtaine, but I can take
orders, I guess. I'm used to the old 'Clarion,' and I kinda like you,
even if we don't agree. Maybe this virtuous jag'll get us some business
for what it loses us. But, say, Mr. Surtaine, you ain't going to get
virtuous in your advertising columns, too, are you?"

"I hadn't considered it," said Hal. "One of these days I'll look into
it."

"For God's sake, don't!" pleaded Shearson, with such a shaken flabbiness
of vehemence that both Hal and Ellis laughed, though the former felt an
uneasy puzzlement.

The article and editorial on the Pierce accident had appeared in a
Thursday's "Clarion." In their issues of the following day, the other
morning papers dealt with the subject most delicately. The "Banner"
published, without obvious occasion, a long and rather fulsome editorial
on E.M. Pierce as a model of high-minded commercial emprise and an
exemplar for youth: also, on the same page in its "Pointed Paragraphs,"
the following, with a point quite too palpably aimed:--

"It is said, on plausible if not direct authority, that one of our
morning contemporaries will appropriately alter its motto to read, 'With
Malice toward All: with Charity for None.'"

But it remained for that evening's "Telegram" to bring up the heavy
guns. From its first edition these headlines stood out, black and
bold:--

E.M. PIERCE DEFENDS DAUGHTER

* * * * *

MAGNATE INCENSED AT UNJUST ATTACKS
WILL PUSH CASE AGAINST HER
TRADUCERS TO A FINISH

There followed an interview in which the great man announced his
intention of bringing both civil and criminal action for libel against
the "Clarion." McGuire Ellis frowned savagely at the sheet.

"Dirty skunk!" he growled.

"Meaning our friend Pierce?" queried Hal.

"No. Meaning Parker, and the whole 'Telegram' outfit."

"Why?"

"Because they printed that interview."

"What's wrong with it? It's news."

"Don't be positively infantile, Boss. Newspapers don't print libel
actions brought against other newspapers. It's unprofessional. It's
unethical. It isn't straight."

"No: I don't see that at all," decided Hal, after some consideration.
"That amounts simply to this, that the newspapers are in a combination
to discourage libel actions, by suppressing all mention of them."

"Certainly. Why not? Libel suits are generally holdups."

"I think the 'Telegram' is right. Whatever Pierce says is news, and
interesting news."

"You bet Parker would never have carried that if his holding corporation
wasn't a heavy borrower in the Pierce banks."

"Maybe not. But I think we'll carry it."

"In the 'Clarion'?" almost shouted Ellis.

"Certainly. Let's have Wayne send a reporter around to Pierce. If
Pierce won't give us an interview, we'll reprint the 'Telegram's,' with
credit."

"We'd be cutting our own throats, and playing Pierce's game. Besides,
stuff about ourselves isn't news."

Hal's inexperience had this virtue, that it was free of the besetting
and prejudicial superstitions of the craft of print. "If it's
interesting, it's the 'Clarion' kind of news."

Ellis, about to protest further, met the younger man's level gaze, and
swallowed hard.

"All right," he said. "I'll tell Wayne."

So the "Clarion" violated another tradition of newspaperdom, to the
amused contempt of its rivals, who were, however, possibly not quite so
amused or so contemptuous as they appeared editorially to be. Also it
followed up the interview with an explicit statement of its own
intentions in the matter, which were not precisely music to the savage
breast of E.M. Pierce.

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