Samuel Hopkins Adams - The Clarion

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"I'll do it NOW," said Esme, and the bird, with a triumphant chirp of
congratulation, swooped off to tell the news to the world of wings and
flowers.

To the consequent interview there was no witness. So it may best be
chronicled in the report made by the interviewer to her friend Mrs.
Festus Willard, who, in the cool seclusion of her sewing-room, was
overwhelmed by a rush of Esme to the heart, as she put it. Not having
been apprised of Miss Elliot's conflicting emotions since her departure,
Mrs. Willard's mind was as a page blank for impressions when her visitor
burst in upon her, pirouetted around the room, appropriated the softest
corner of the divan, and announced spiritedly:

"You needn't ask me where I've been, for I won't tell you; or what I've
been doing, for it's my own affair; anyway, you wouldn't be interested.
And if you insist on knowing, I've been revisiting the pale glimpses of
the moon--at three o'clock P.M."

"What do you mean, moon?" inquired Mrs. Willard, unconsciously falling
into a pit of slang.

"The moon we all cry for and don't get. In this case a haughty young
editor."

"You've been to see Hal Surtaine," deduced Mrs. Willard.

"You have guessed it--with considerable aid and assistance."

"What for?"

"On a matter of journalistic import," said Miss Elliot solemnly.

"But you don't cry for Hal Surtaine," objected her friend, reverting to
the lunar metaphor.

"Don't I? I'd have cried--I'd have burst into a perfect storm of
tears--for him--or you--or anybody who so much as pointed a finger at
me, I was so scared."

"Scared? You! I don't believe it."

"I don't believe it myself--now," confessed Esme, candidly. "But it felt
most extremely like it at the time."

"You know I don't at all approve of--"

"Of me. I know you don't, Jinny. Neither does he."

"What did you do to him?"

"Me? I cooed at him like a dove of peace.

"But he was very stiff and proud
He said, 'You needn't talk so loud,'"

chanted Miss Esme mellifluously.

"He didn't!"

"Well, if he didn't, he meant it. He wanted to know what the big, big
D-e-v, dev, I was doing there, anyway."

"Norrie Elliot! Tell me the truth."

"Very well," said Miss Elliot, aggrieved. "_You_ report the
conversation, then, since you won't accept my version."

"If you would give me a start--"

"Just what he wouldn't do for me," interrupted Esme. "I went in there
to explain something and he pointed the finger of scorn at me and
accused me of frequenting low and disreputable localities."

"Norrie!"

"Well," replied the girl brazenly, "he said he'd seen me about the
Rookeries district; and if that isn't a low--"

"Had he?"

"Nothing more probable, though I didn't happen to see him there."

"What were you doing there?"

"Precisely what he wanted to know. He said it rather as if he owned the
place. So I explained in words of one syllable that I went there to pick
edelweiss from the fire escapes. Jinny, dear, you don't know how hard it
is to crowd 'edelweiss' into one syllable until you've tried. It
splutters."

"So do you," said the indignant Mrs. Willard. "You do worse; you gibber.
If you weren't just the prettiest thing that Heaven ever made, some one
would have slain you long ago for your sins."

"Pretty, yourself," retorted Esme. "My real charm lies in my rigid
adherence to the spirit of truth. Your young friend Mr. Surtaine scorned
my floral jest. He indicated that I ought not to be about the tenements.
He said there was a great deal of sickness there. That was why I was
there, I explained politely. Then he said that the sickness might be
contagious, and he muttered something about an epidemic and then looked
as if he wished he hadn't."

"I've heard some talk of sickness in the Rookeries. Ought you to be
going there?" asked the other anxiously.

"Mr. Surtaine thinks not. Quite severely. And in elderly tones.
Naturally I asked him what kind of an epidemic it was. He said he didn't
know, but he was sure the place was dangerous, and he was surprised that
Uncle Guardy hadn't warned me. Uncle Guardy _had_, but I don't do
everything I'm warned about. So then I asked young Mr. Editor why, as he
knew there was a dangerous epidemic about, he should warn little me
privately instead of warning the big public, publicly."

"Meddlesome child! Can you never learn to keep your hands off?"

"I was spurring him to his editorial duties.

"But he was very proud and stiff ...
He said that he would tell me, if--"

lilted Miss Esme, rising to do a _pas seul_ upon the Willards' priceless
Anatolian rug.

"Sit down," commanded her hostess. "If--what?"

"If nothing. Just if. That's the end of the song. Don't you know your
Lewis Carroll?

"I sent a message to the fish,
I told them, 'This is what I wish.'
The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer--"

"I don't want to know about the fish," disclaimed Mrs. Willard
vehemently. "I want to know what happened between you and Hal Surtaine."

"And you the Vice-President of the Poetry Club!" reproached Esme. "Very
well. He was very proud and--Oh, I said that before. But he really was,
this time. He said, 'Our last discussion of the policy of the "Clarion"
closed that topic between us.' Somebody called him away before I could
think of anything mean and superior enough to answer, and when he came
back--always supposing he isn't still hiding in the cellar--I was no
longer present."

"Then you didn't give him the message you went for."

"No. Didn't I say I was scared?"

Mrs. Willard excused herself, ostensibly to speak to a maid; in reality
to speak to a telephone. On her return she made a frontal attack:--

"Norrie, what made you break your engagement to Will Douglas?"

"Why? Don't you approve?"

"Did you break it for the same reason that drove you into it?"

"What reason do you think drove me into it?"

"Hal Surtaine."

"He didn't!" she denied furiously.

"And you didn't break it because of him?"

"No! I broke it because I don't want to get married," cried the girl in
a rush of words. "Not to Will Douglas. Or to--to anybody. Why should I?
I don't want to--I won't," she continued, half laughing, half sobbing,
"go and have to bother about running a house and have a lot of babies
and lose my pretty figure--and get fat--and dowdy--and slow-poky--and
old. Look at Molly Vane: twins already. She's a horrible example. Why do
people always have to have children--"

She stopped, abruptly, herself stricken at the stricken look in the
other's face. "Oh, Jinny, darling Jinny," she gasped; "I forgot! Your
baby. Your little, dead baby! I'm a fool; a poor little silly fool,
chattering of realities that I know nothing about."

"You will know some day, my dear," said the other woman, smiling
valiantly. "Don't deny the greatest reality of all, when it comes. Are
you sure you're not denying it now?"

The sunbeams crept and sparkled, like light upon ruffled waters, across
Esme's obstinately shaken head.

"Perhaps you couldn't help hurting him. But be sure you aren't hurting
yourself, too."

"That's the worst of it," said the girl, with one of her sudden accesses
of sweet candor. "I needn't have hurt him at all. I was stupid." She
paused in her revelation. "But he was stupider," she declared
vindictively; "so it serves him right."

"How was he stupider?"

"He thought," said Esme with sorrowful solemnity, "that I was just as
bad as I seemed. He ought to have known me better."

The older woman bent and laid a cheek against the sunny hair. "And
weren't you just as bad as you seemed?"

"Worse! Anyway, I'm afraid so," said the confessional voice, rather
muffled in tone. "But I--I just got led into it. Oh, Jinny, I'm not
awfully happy."

Mrs. Willard's head went up and she cocked an attentive ear, like an
expectant robin. "Some one outside," said she. "I'll be back in a
moment. You sit there and think it over."

Esme curled back on the divan. A minute later she heard the curtains
part at the end of the dim room, and glanced up with a smile, to face,
not Jeannette Willard, but Hal Surtaine.

"You 'phoned for me, Lady Jinny," he began: and then, with a start,
"Esme! I--I didn't expect to find you here."

"Nor I to see you," she said, with a calmness that belied her beating
heart. "Sit down, please. I have something to tell you. It's what I
really came to the office to say."

"Yes?"

"About Kathleen Pierce."

Hal frowned. "Do you think there can be any use--"

"Please," she begged, with uplifted eyes of entreaty. "She--she didn't
tell me the truth about that interview with your reporter. It was true;
but she made me think it wasn't. She confessed to me, and she feels very
badly. So do I. I believed that you had deliberately made that up, about
her saying that she didn't turn back because she wanted to catch a
train. I believed, too, that the editorial was written after our--our
talk. I'm sorry."

Hal stood above her, looking rather stern, and a little old and worn,
she thought.

"If that is an apology, it is accepted," he said with surface
politeness.

To him she was, in that moment, a light-minded woman apologizing for the
petty misdeed, and paying no heed to the graver wrong that she had done
him. Jeannette Willard could have set him right in a word; could have
shown him what the girl felt, unavowedly to herself but with underlying
conviction, that for so great an offense no apology could suffice;
nothing short of complete surrender. But Mrs. Willard was not there to
help out. She was waiting hopefully, outside.

"And that is all?" he said, after a pause, with just a shade of contempt
in his voice.

"All," she said lightly, "unless you choose to tell me how the 'Clarion'
is getting on."

"As well as could be expected. We pay high for our principles. But thus
far we've held to them. You should read the paper."

"I do."

"To expect your approval would be too much, I suppose."

"No. In many ways I like it. In fact, I think I'll renew my
subscription."

It was innocently said, without thought of the old playful bargain
between them, which had terminated with the mailing of the withered
arbutus. But to Hal it seemed merely a brazen essay in coquetry; an
attempt to reconstitute the former relation, for her amusement.

"The subscription lists are closed, on the old terms," he said crisply.

"Oh, you couldn't have thought I meant that!" she whispered; but he was
already halfway down the room, on the echo of his "Good-afternoon, Miss
Elliot."

As before, he turned at the door. And he carried with him, to muse over
in the depths of his outraged heart once more, the mystery of that still
and desperate smile. Any woman could have solved it for him. Any,
except, possibly, Esme Elliot.

"It didn't come out as I hoped, Festus," said the sorrowful little Mrs.
Willard to her husband that evening. "I don't know that Hal will ever
believe in her again. How can he be so--so stupidly unforgiving!"

"Always the man's fault, of course," said her big husband comfortably.

"No. She's to blame. But it's the fault of men in general that Norrie is
what she is; the men of this town, I mean. No man has ever been a man
with Norrie Elliot."

"What have they been?"

"Mice. It's a tradition of the place. They lie down in rows for her to
trample on. So of course she tramples on them."

"Well, I never trampled on mice myself," observed Festus Willard. "It
sounds like uncertain footing. But I'll bet you five pounds of your
favorite candy against one of your very best kisses, that if she
undertakes to make a footpath of Hal Surtaine she'll get her feet hurt."

"Or her heart," said his wife. "And, oh, Festus dear, it's such a real,
warm, dear heart, under all the spoiled-childness of her."

CHAPTER XXV

STERN LOGIC

Between Dr. Surtaine and his son had risen a barrier built up of
reticences. At the outset of their reunion, they had chattered like a
pair of schoolboy friends, who, after long separation, must rehearse to
each other the whole roster of experiences. The Doctor was an enthusiast
of speech, glowingly loquacious above knife and fork, and the dinner
hours were enlivened for his son by his fund of far-gathered business
incidents and adventures, pointed with his crude but apt philosophy, and
irradiated with his centripetal optimism. He possessed and was conscious
of this prime virtue of talk, that he was never tiresome. Yet recently
he had noted a restlessness verging to actual distaste on Hal's part,
whenever he turned the conversation upon his favorite topic, the
greatness of Certina and the commercial romance of the proprietary
medicine business.

In his one close fellowship, the old quack cultivated even the minor and
finer virtues. With Hal he was scrupulously tactful. If the boy found
_his_ business an irksome subject, he would talk about the boy's
business. And he did, sounding the Paean of Policy across the Surtaine
mahogany in a hundred variations supported by a thousand instances. But
here, also, Hal grew restive. He responded no more willingly to leads on
journalism than to encomiums of Certina. Again the affectionate diplomat
changed his ground. He dropped into the lighter personalities; chatted
to Hal of his new friends, and was met halfway. But in secret he puzzled
and grieved over the waning of frankness and freedom in their
intercourse. Dinner, once eagerly looked forward to by both as the best
hour of the day, was now something of an ordeal, a contact in which
each must move warily, lest, all unknowing, he bruise the other.

Of the underlying truth of the situation Dr. Surtaine had no inkling.
Had any one told him that his son dared neither speak nor hear
unreservedly, lest the gathering suspicions about his father, against
which he was fighting while denying to himself their very existence,
should take form and substance of unescapable facts, the Doctor would
have failed utterly of comprehension. He ascribed Hal's unease and
preoccupation to a more definite cause. Sedulous in everything which
concerned his "Boyee," he had learned something of the affair with Esme
Elliot, and had surmised distressfully how hard the blow had been: but
what worried him much more were rumors connecting Hal's name with Milly
Neal. Several people had seen the two on the day of the road-house
adventure. Milly, with her vivid femininity was a natural mark for
gossip. The mere fact that she had been in Hal's runabout was enough to
set tongues wagging. Then, sometime thereafter, she had resigned her
position in the "Clarion" office without giving any reason, so Dr.
Surtaine understood. The whole matter looked ugly. Not that the
charlatan would have been particularly shocked had Hal exhibited a
certain laxity of morals in the matter of women. For this sort of
offense Dr. Surtaine had an easy toleration, so long as it was kept
decently under cover. But that his son should become entangled with one
of his--Dr. Surtaine's--employees, a woman under the protection of his
roof, even though it were but the factory roof--that, indeed, would be a
shock to his feudal conception of business honor.

Such dismal considerations the Doctor had suppressed during an unusually
uncomfortable dinner, on a hot and thunder-breeding evening when both of
the Surtaines had painfully talked against time. Immediately after the
meal, Hal, on pretext of beating the storm to the office, left. His
father took his forebodings to the club and attempted to lose them
along with several rubbers of absent-minded bridge. Meantime the woman
for whom his loyalty was concerned as well as for his son, was
stimulating a resolution with the slow poison of liquor around the
corner from the "Clarion" office.

Nine P.M. is slack tide in a morning newspaper office. The afternoon
news is cleared up; the night wires have not yet begun to buzz with
outer-world tidings of importance; the reporters are still afield on the
evening's assignments. As the champion short-distance sleeper of his
craft, which distinction he claimed for himself without fear of
successful contradiction, McGuire Ellis was wont to devote half an hour
or more, beginning on the ninth stroke of the clock, to the cultivation
of Morpheus. Intruders were not popular at that hour.

To respect for this habitude, Reginald Currier, known to mortals as Bim,
Guardian of the Sacred Gates, had been rigorously educated. But Bim had
a creed of his own which mollified the rigidity of specific standards,
and one tenet thereof was the apothegm, "Once a 'Clarion' man, always a
'Clarion' man," the same applying to women. Therefore, when Milly Neal
appeared at the gate at 9.05 in the evening, the Cerberus greeted her
professionally with a "How goes it, Miss Cutie?" and passed her in
without question. She went straight to the inner office.

"Hoong!" grunted McGuire Ellis, rubbing his eyes in a desperate endeavor
to disentangle dreams from actualities. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"I want to see Mr. Surtaine."

Something in the girl's aspect put Ellis on his guard. "What do you want
to see him about?" he asked.

"I don't see any Examination Bureau license pinned to you, Ellis," she
retorted hardily.

"The Boss is out."

"I don't believe it."

"All right," said McGuire Ellis equably. "I'm a liar."

"Then you're the proper man for a 'Clarion' job," came the savage
retort.

"Come off, Kitty. Don't be young!"

"I want to see Hal Surtaine," she said with sullen insistence.

Shaking himself out of his chair, the associate editor started across
the room to the telephone at Hal's desk, but halted sharply in front of
the girl.

"You've been drinking," he said.

"What's it to you if I have?"

The man's hand fell on her shoulder. There was no familiarity in the
act; only comradeship. Comradeship in the voice, also, and concern, as
he said, "Cut it, Neal, cut it. There's nothing in it. You're too good
stuff to throw yourself away on that."

"Don't you worry about me." She shook off his hand, and seated herself.

"Still working at the Certina joint?"

"No. I'm not working."

"See here, Neal: what made you quit us?"

The girl withheld speech back of tight-pressed lips.

"Oh, well, never mind that. The point is, we miss you. We miss the
'Cutie' column. It was good stuff. We want you back."

Still silence.

"And I guess you miss us. You liked the job, didn't you?"

The girl gazed past him with ashen eyes. "Oh, my God!" she said under
her breath.

"Your job back and no questions asked," pursued Ellis, with an outer
cheerfulness which cost him no small effort in the face of his growing
conviction of some tragic issue pending.

Now she looked directly at him, and there was a flicker of flame in her
regard.

"Do you know what a Hardscrabbler is, Ellis?" she asked.

The other rubbed his head in puzzlement. "I don't believe I do," he
confessed.

"Then you won't understand when I tell you that I'm one and that I'd see
your 'Clarion' blazing in hell before I'd take another cent of your
money." The fire died from her face, and in her former tone of dulled
stolidity she repeated, "I want to see Mr. Surtaine."

With every word uttered, McGuire Ellis's forebodings had grown darker.
That Hal Surtaine, carried away by the girl's vividness and allure,
might have involved himself in a _liaison_ with her was credible enough.
He recalled the episode of the road-house, on that stormy spring day.
That Hal would have deserted her afterward, Ellis could not believe. And
yet--and yet--why otherwise should she come with the marks of fierce
misery in her face, demanding an interview at this time? On one point
Ellis's mind was swiftly made up: she should not see Hal.

"Miss Neal," he said quietly, "you can sit there all night, but you
can't see the Boss unless you tell me your errand."

The girl rose, slowly. "Oh, I guess you all stand together here," she
said. "Well, remember: I gave him his chance to square himself."

When Hal came up from a visit to the new press half an hour later, Ellis
had decided to say nothing of the call. Later, he must have it out with
his employer, for the sake of both of them and of the "Clarion." But it
was an ordeal which he was glad to postpone. Nothing more, he judged,
was to be feared that night, from Milly Neal; he could safely sleep over
the problem. Having a certain sufficient religion of his own, McGuire
Ellis still believes that a merciful Heaven forgives us our sins; but,
looking back on that evening's decision, he sometimes wonders whether it
ever fully pardons our mistakes.

While he sat reading proof on the status of a flickering foreign war,
the Hardscrabbler's daughter, in a quiet back room farther down the
block, slowly sipped more gin; and gin is fire and fury to the
Hardscrabbler blood.

At eleven o'clock that evening, Dr. Surtaine, returning to that massive
hybrid of architecture which he called home, found Milly Neal waiting in
his study.

"Well, Milly: what's up?" he asked, cheerfully enough in tone, but with
a sinking heart.

"I want to know what you're going to do for me?"

"Something wrong?"

"You've got a right to know. I'm in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"The kind you make money out of with your Relief Pills."

"Milly! Milly!" cried the quack, in honest distress. "I wouldn't have
believed it of you."

"Yes: it's terrible, isn't it!" mocked the girl. "What are you going to
do about it? It's up to you."

"Up to me?" queried the Doctor, bracing himself for what was coming.

"Don't you promise, with your Relief Pills to get women out of trouble?"

Dr. Surtaine's breath came a little easier. Perhaps she was not going to
force the issue upon him by mentioning Hal. If this were diplomacy, he
would play the game.

"Certainly not! Certainly not!" he protested with a scandalized air.
"We've never made such a claim. It would be against the law."

"Look at this." She held up in her left hand a clipping, showing a
line-cut of a smiling woman, over the caption "A Happy Lady"; and
announcing in wide print, "Every form of suppression relieved. The most
obstinate cases yield at once. Thousands of once desperate women bless
the name of Relief Pills."

"I don't want to look at it," said the Doctor.

"No, I guess you don't! It's from the 'Clarion,' that clipping. And the
Neverfail Company that makes the fake abortion pills is _you_."

"It doesn't mean--that. You've misread it."

"It _does_ mean just that to every poor, silly fool of a girl that reads
it. What else can it mean? 'The most obstinate cases'--"

"Don't! Don't!" There was a pause, then:

"Of course, you can't stay in the Certina factory after this."

A bitter access of mirth seized the girl. The sound of it

"rang cracked and thin,
Like a fiend's laughter, heard in Hell,
Far down."

"Of course!" she mocked. "The pious and holy Dr. Surtaine couldn't have
an employee who went wrong. Not even though it was his lies that helped
tempt her."

"Don't try to put it off on me. You are suffering for your own sin, my
girl," accused the quack.

"I'll stand my share of it; the suffering and the disgrace, if there is
any. But you've got to stand your share. You promised to get me out of
this and I believed you."

"_I_! Promised to--"

"In plain print." She tossed the clipping at him with her left hand. The
other she held in her lap, under a light wrap which she carried. "And I
believed you. I thought you were square. Then when the pills didn't
help, I went to a doctor, and he laughed and said they were nothing but
sugar and flavoring. He wouldn't help me. He said no decent doctor
would. _You_ ain't a decent doctor. You're a lying devil. Are you going
to help me out?"

"If you had come in a proper spirit--"

"That's enough. I've got my answer." She rose slowly to her feet. "After
I found out what was wrong with me, I went home to my father. I didn't
tell him about myself. But I told him I was quitting the Certina
business. And he told me about my mother, how you sent her to her death.
One word from me would have brought him here after you. _This_ time he
wouldn't have missed you. Then they'd have hung him, I suppose. That's
why I held my tongue. You killed my mother, you and your quack
medicines; and now you've done this to me." Her hand jerked up out of
the wrap. "I don't see where you come in to live any longer," said Milly
Neal deliberately.

Dr. Surtaine looked into the muzzle of a revolver.

There was a step on the soft rug outside, the curtain of the door to Dr.
Surtaine's right parted, and Hal appeared. He carried a light stick.

"I thought I heard--" he began. Then, seeing the revolver, "What's this!
Put that down!"

"Don't move, either of you," warned the girl. "I haven't said my say
out. You're a fine-matched pair, you two! Him with his sugar-pills and
you, Hal Surtaine, with your lying promises."

Lying promises! The phrase, thus used in the girl's mouth against the
son, struck to the father's heart, confirming his dread. It _was_ Hal,
then. For the moment he forgot his instant peril, in his sorrow and
shame.

"I don't know why I shouldn't kill you both," went on the half-crazed
girl. "That'd even the score. Two Surtaines against two Neals, my mother
and me."

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